Chapters A young red pegasus stallion, Keto Profen, sighs with exhausted relief as he finally finishes dealing with yet another patient, and the last in the line. Right after he does, he hears the door open and once again opens his eyes.
A light greenish-blue pegasus mare with a swept-back orange mane enters the pharmacy through the front door and begins lethargically dragging her hooves up to the counter. It takes her a moment to reach it, as she walks with a half-hung head and an absent look on her face.
“Hi, eh-how can I help you?” Keto greets her with a half-awkwardness, typically being introverted and just having had to interact with a number of ponies.
The mare sluggishly sets the piece of paper down on the counter in front of her, and slides it over to him slowly with her hoof.
“My doctor gave me this.” The mare all but mumbles in an apathetic voice.
Keto Profen places his own hoof on the slip and drags it over the rest of the way. It was a prescription, though anypony could just guessed that, and it was authentic; raised Equestrian Medical Association seal and all.
In his upper peripheral vision Keto Profen notices that the mare's hoof is still on the countertop, albeit just on the edge. He lifts up his to look at her and sees that she's practically just letting her hoof slowly slide off of the counter by gravity's act alone. In fact, she wasn't even paying attention to it, or him, she was just looking hollowly down.
“Ah . . . hey, is everything alright?” Keto feels compelled to ask.
Keto Profen knows the answer to his own question, granted not what her exact answer might be. But, he had gone through enough Patient Behavior in Healthcare courses in his studies to at least be able to intuit when somepony has something seriously bothering them in some manner.
“. . . Yeah . . . it’s fine.” Lightning responded with a lie, voice filled to the brim with hollow misery.
She doesn't even look at him when she answers, and a prickling flush runs up him as he realizes that he's about to navigate an attempt at an empathetic interaction with this mare standing across from him. Were it not for his coat being red itself, his face would be beginning to show a faint red of its own right now.
“It really doesn't look like it. Ah-I know ponies you don't know asking you what's wrong can get kind of annoying, but . . . well everypony who cares about probably said they want to help you, but even if it's something nopony else really can you should tell me; I'm going to be one of your doctors. Or, well, I am a doctor, just a different kind than ponies usually think it means.” Keto does his best to maintain something of a pleasant tone.
“Nopony tells me they wanna help.” She replies bitterly.
Keto Profen takes a moment to absorb her response before he winces a bit to it. She was definitely depressed then, that much he could see for sure.
He looks down at her prescription again, and is thus not at all surprised at what he finds written: Venlafaxine 75mg qd, fill 30, Rf - 0. Venlafaxine is an antidepressant, exactly as he had then expected.
He lifts his head back up to her again.
“No pony? W-uh . . . I mean, have you talked about this-whatever's going on with anypony else? Just your doctor?” He can’t avoid letting a hinting tone of disbelief slip into his voice.
“No, can I just have this stuff and leave now?” She answers him rather shortly.
“Uuuhh, sure, I-I can prepare this for you if you're really in a hurry. But . . . ah-I really wouldn't exactly feel great about just . . .” He starts to respond.
Keto Profen halts for an instant, clenching his teeth.
“. . . letting you head out like this, unless you really, really NEED to go.” He finishes his sentence, sounding as uneasy as he feels.
“Yeah, I have a ripped uniform to stare at some more.” She affirms her position despondently.
“A unif-staring? At a uniform? Uh, something that means something to you?” Keto finds what she said a bit weird and asks about it.
“He doesn't even know. Nopony knows what it's like; not that stupid doctor and not you.” Her voice is beginning to waver as she speaks back.
“Y . . . your doctor doesn't understand what's bothering you?” Keto asks the question the only way that he can obviously think to.
Lightning Dust lifts her head up, looking right at him with an expression lost in a blur between reactive anger and overwhelming sadness.
“Bothering me? Nopony gets it. None of you other stupid ponies get it!” She declares with both sadness and anger.
“Uh-uh sssory. I'm sorry . . . please, I'm sorry. Whatever it is, th-ugh, there's nothing I can do, not even knowing what's going on.” Keto fumbles about with words, trying to apologize.
She only continues to attempt to glare at him, but her expression comes off as a shaky straight face, depression and frustration both pulling on her equally. Keto Profen struggles to keep his own appearing somewhat calm while his panic and unsurity fight to show themselves.
“I don't want you to feel like this, or, however you are.” Keto Profen tries to tell her.
“Will you just give me this stupid stuff and let me go? I don't care what you don't want me to feel like; you don't even know anything about it.” Lightning lets her bitterness get ahold of her voice.
“Yeah, I know, but I'm trying to ask you to tell me about it. And no, I can't, this has to be rewritten anyways; you're . . . ah, a lot more depressed than I think your doctor thought.” He tries her again, and lets her know of his intention to alter her medicative regimen.
“Just let me leave.” She mutters to herself.
“Hmm, yeah, there's no way 75 milligrams is going to be enough. I know it's the standard starting dose, but still . . .” Keto Profen thinks out loud.
As Keto Profen stares down at the prescription slip, thinking, Lightning Dust abruptly turns about and begins to walk away from the counter back towards the door.
“Huh? Uh-wait!” He yells to stop her, though his yell itself is weak.
Keto Profen begins to feel an onsetting rush of panic rise up within him. This was his first day being allowed to run the pharmacy alone, and Lightning Dust, an obviously severely depressed patient was just walking away.
“Just back off and let me leave! I shouldn't even be here. I shouldn't even be cause this . . . this wasn't supposed to happen!” Lightning snaps at him.
“Miss, what . . .” Keto started asking, but she almost immediately cut him off.
“It's LIGHTING DUST!” She rages at him.
Keto Profen cringes at the wrath in her response, and hesitates a bit more as he tries to approach her again.
“I was . . .” He tries to continue, only to be blocked from it again.
“You DON'T know what it's like! And you DON'T care! So stop trying to act like it!” She makes what she’s convinced of explicitly known.
Keto Profen is just left to listen to her all the way at this point; he feels it's the best thing he can do, and given his social skills, probably the only effective thing.
“I was the best! I was the best flyer wherever I was! Always! I should have . . .” She isn’t even able to finish what she begins to attempt to rage out.
This time, as she reaches those last words, it's her who begins to cringe, and cringe hard. Her knees quiver even, for a few seconds, until she lifts up one hoof and slams it back into the ground. Her teeth grit and show just after the impact.
“I blew this one chance! This is it, there's nothing left! My dream is . . . gone.” She finishes what she was saying as her depression overpowers her anger and regains its control.
Understanding now finally snaps into Keto Profen with this clarity-bringing revelation. He himself even feels a good bit of mock-sorrow, imagining what it would have been like for him if his attempt to get into Pharmacy School had failed.
“Ah-uh . . . yeah, I don't know, not what that's like. But I can relate to feeling really depressed like that, just . . . not as much as that would do.” Keto pulls a couple sentences together, coming back out of the silent position he had taken to listen to her.
Lightning Dust stays where she is, and just looks down at her hooves, or rather the empty ground between them. Keto Profen hesitates a bit longer to see if she'll respond, but worried she might resume walking away, he continues.
“Ah-I obviously don't know what that's like, but . . . for the whole time it me to finally get here to my dream, all I ever did was doubt that I was ever going to make it. All six years of education. And even now . . . I still don't exactly have any confidence in myself and I come in here waiting to be fired every day.” He tells a portion of his own story, hoping for an understanding to pass between them, and for her to be able to see him as more than just an object.
Lightning Dust keeps her head down for another few seconds, until she can't help but lift it and turn to look over her shoulder at him with a practically compulsive odd, though still depressed, look. Anypony not having confidence in themselves had just never made any sense to her at all, to the point that even now that lack of sense managed to seize some prevalence away from the depression for a moment.
“But, I was depressed, all the time. I know it wasn't anything like what you feel, or I mean it can't have been; not anywhere that bad. But it still interfered my life, a lot, like I know this must-is, obviously, doing to you.” He goes on to tell her just a little bit more.
Keto Profen washes over with so much relief when Lightning Dust finally turns back around and starts slowly walking back up to his counter.
“And You took . . . whatever this is too?” She asks him.
“Uh, no, something different, but it's from the exact same drug class, so you could say that . . . kind of.” He does his best to explain it basically to her.
“Yeah, fine . . . I guess.” She reluctantly agrees to give him credibility.
“Oh, then uh, let me grab this real quick. Effexor is usually in a pre-set bottle ...” Keto says after a relieved sigh.
Keto Profen cranes his around looking down the rows of shelves and steps a ways off to search for her particular antidepressant.
“I don't care, I just don't want to be like this forever.” She mutters miserably.
“Here!” Keto exclaims when he finds the arrangement of Venlafaxine/Effexor bottles.
He quickly comes back to the counter with a bottle.
“Now-aahhh, hm, ehrrr four, I'd say four days; come back in four days. I mean you don't have to, I'm not saying. You're just as free to stick to the standardized prescription regimen your doctor sent you here with as you are anything else. But I'd just like to see you back in about four days cause I . . . I really think it'll be a lot better for you if you're on a higher dose than he wrote. I do agree with starting at this though, if anything just to make sure you don't have any negative reactions. If you want to, you can come back after a few days and we can talk about it some more? I'd really like to see you again.” Keto spoke for the longest he had since Lightning first came in.
Concealed underneath his red fur, Keto Profen's face heats up in a blush after he realizes how much his last sentence might have sounded like he was interested in her on a relational level.
“Yeah, sure, I guess.” Lightning agrees to return in her apathy-restored voice.
Lightning responds without even looking up at him, though she does remove her head itself from the counter top. Her eyes stay aimed low and look from one direction to the other
Suddenly, she does raise her head back up near it's normal position and looks at Keto Profen.
“T-that's when you're going to be here again, right?” She uncertainly asks, not comfortable with the idea of dealing with anyone else since only Keto has remotely understand her so far.
Keto Profen makes a sound just to acknowledge that he heard what she said, and then smiles by just a tiny bit and nods twice.
“That's Thursday so I'll be here; I'm always here all day on Thursdays.” Keto Profen assures her.
“Yeah . . . I'll come back if you really can make this stupid stuff make this all just go away.” She says.
“Well-ah . . . I can't "just do" things. I mean it all depends on the severity of the condition, no matter what the medicine is, and on how well your body responds to it.” He has to respond back, hesitantly, aware of the potential consequences of the truth.
Lightning Dust begins to swiftly lose the tiny bit of upliftedness that had just begun to gain access to her face. Keto Profen instantly makes himself go on upon seeing it, desparate to keep her from slipping back or entering a worse emotional state than she'd walked in with.
“But I can help you. I'm supposed to be here to guide you through everything you need to know about taking your prescription, and to answer any questions about it or anything else.” He goes on to try to prevent her from regressing back down from the momentary hope she’d seemed to have gained.
Lightning eases her expression down a little bit, but overall she still appears unsure again. She looks glumly down at her hooves for a moment, and then turns her head to look outside, at the thin strip of sky she could see out of the Pharmacy's front windows.
“Hey, it's . . . ugh, nothing's a guarantee of anything. I can't promise you that anything I give you will make all of your depressive feelings go away.” He say to her, making her turn her head back to him.
“But, Lightning I do promise you it will do Something. It-it just may not be the best for you. I don't know you. Or-uh, uh-I don't know anything about you, physically . . .” Keto continues to speak, but cuts himself short.
Keto Profen's face shot a deep enough crimson to match the color of his fur, which again concealed it. He couldn't believe he actually just said that, or at least what it could sound like.
“Your body might react differently too it that it would to other SSRIs, or SNRIs. It's side effects might bother you more than some other medicine's would. And, your-y-rr, stupid stuttering, you might just not find it as effective as you want. But it will do Something.” He explains to clear away his red-facedness, and promises her again.
Lightning slowly changes to appear so much more hopeful, though still with her deeply depressive state obviously visible.
She looks him eye-to-eye with her new believing, dimly hopeful expression. Her eyes shift down to the white, labeled bottle of pill capsules that Keto had brought up and placed halfway between the two of them on the counter. For a few seconds of time she stares, but then finally lifts her eyes back up to him.
“Alright, if you're saying it will do something, at least.” Lightning finally agrees to listen to him completely.
She reaches and pulls the bottle over to herself across the counter.
“Yeah. I promise.” He says, even smiling whole-heartedly, which he often found difficult.
“Just come back in four days, on Thursday so we can see if you have any contraindicating reactions to Venlafaxine. If you seem fine with taking it then I'll use my Pharmaceutical authority ehh-for the first time, and see about upping your dose.” Keto repeats himself from earlier in summary.
“Uhh-um, is that O.K?” He then asks.
“Sure, I guess . . .” She responds in mope again.
“Oh! Ahh sorry about making it seem like I was telling you you had to come back, we're only ever supposed to suggest things.” Keto Profen suddenly tells her out the guilt from his realization at the fact.
Keto sighs with a closed-eyes look of mental exhaustion.
“I’m gonna get fired.” He says quietly, resolved to what he assumes is his inevitable fate.
“I bet you won't.” Lightning lets out a horse snort before betting.
Keto lifts his head and opens his eyes back up with a look of slight confusion as to the grumbling tone of Lightning's voice used with her otherwise would-be cheer-up comment.
“Hmpf, I never though I'd get kicked out; I was never even worried about what I was doing . . . and I got kicked out . . .” She reveals where she is coming from in what she said.
Keto's confused look turns to one of uncomfortable empathy as he gets that she's referencing whatever's behind her extreme depressive state.
“You're worried you might get fired, you said you're always worried about everything . . . so you probably never will, since I wasn't and I did . . .” She finishes what she had begun telling him.
Keto can't overcome muteness for several moments after she finishes, for lack of knowing really what to say. All the while his face at least does a decent job of displaying his uncertainty.
“Uh-hey . . . don't-don't let me say anything that bring's up really bad memories or-no, agh, that's not . . . what comes out of my mouth isn't your responsibility, it's mine. I'm sorry” Keto berates himself again.
Lightning reaches across the counter and starts to pull the bottle over to her side.
“Wha-No, wait! I have to tell you some things about it first.” He stops her.
Lightning holds her hoof in place around the bottle for several seconds before letting go and letting her hoof slide back by gravity to the counter's edge, only this time keeping it just clinging on as opposed to letting it fall.
“You just-uh you have to take this with food; or at least you should, unless you have an iron stomach. And don't take any of the common pain&fever meds with this, only Acetaminophen. So, none of the profens; no Ibuprofen, Naxoprofen . . . me, Keto Profen. And . . .” Keto runs through the first portion of his knowledge about the medical drug he was giving to her, revealing that his name is also that of a medication in the process.
Keto pauses for a moment, twisting the bottle back and forth examining each phonetic portion of the drug's chemical compound name.
“it . . . looks like you shouldn't expect too much negative reaction to it, just that it might start giving you bad insomnia once we move you up to higher doses.” He finished off with the last bit of what he thought she should know.
“Why don't you just give me the higher dose now? Nopony gets it: I can't take being like this.” Lighting suddenly questions in depressed frustration.
Keto Profen winces at her miserably aggrivated demand. One hoof even lifts just off the ground and tucks back a bit for a few seconds. He appears stuck, empathetic but stuck, and the red his face is turning is almost enough to be seen through his fur.
“Ah-I, I . . . I know. I really really do think this dose is too low for you, but I don't wanna take any risks with you either. That's why I really want you to take this one but only for the four days we agreed and then I'll elavate you, I promise. It's just, if you turn out to be hypersensative to it there's really bad things that could happen to you.” Keto explains under stressed sympathy.
“And the higher the dose you start at without knowing if you are hypersensative to the drug, the worse that outcome will be. You could get Serotonin Syndrome from this, and really quickly go into hyperthermia.” He goes to explain more.
Lightning still appeared as depressed as she was, and if anything far more depressed than confused, but her lack of understanding of Keto's terminology did show in her look.
“You're a flyer right? I mean an athlete. You know how hot and overheated you can feel after working out real hard for a really long time; hyperthermia's overheating, just like that but three times worse to the point you feel sick . . . and you can die . . .” He tries to adapt what he previously said over to something more understandable.
Lightning's expression started initially at depressed denial of what Keto was saying, but from his voice at the end, her face changed over to one of grudgingly reckoning with reality.
“And I don't want that. I mean, especially not you. Somepony who could qualify to try out for the WonderBolts would be a hard loss, there's so much you could do.” He says, slipping his words and accidentally using I instead of nopony.
Keto Profen's face becomes red enough now that it does show through his fur. How could he keep sounding so stupid? He'd meant to just be encouraging, but what he was saying could easily be misheard as him attempting, although horribly, to flirt in some manner his patient.
To Keto's relief, albeit a guilty relief for feeling such at her unyielding depression, her expression didn't alter.
“Yeah right.” Lightning bitterly mumbles.
“It doesn't even matter; being in the Wonderbolts is all I ever wanted, but now it's gone.” She declares to him, completely broken.
“Yeah, if I'd been stopped from getting to be a Pharmacist . . . I'd be pretty soul-crushed.” He connects completely with what would have been the same for him.
Neither of them say anything. Lightning continues to look miserably down at the ground, while Keto does the same while glancing up at her once a second to know when she was ready to resume.
“So is that it?” She asks plainly.
“Oh? Oh, uh-yeah, there-there's nothing else to tell you. About your medication, I mean.” Keto affirms.
“I'll come back by on Thursday.” She says, finally, raising a smile on Keto Profen’s face.
Lighting tilts her head sideways and grips the small pill bottle in her mouth. She mumbles or says something in a really low voice as she turns away. The words sound distorted by her having a little plastic bottle sideways in her mouth, but they're still discernable to Keto Profen as a "Thanks". A glum thanks, but a thanks all the same, and it brightens up his day.
Keto picks up a clipboard with his wing and a pencil with mouth and begins walking up down the aisles of medication shelves, taking inventory. At the start of the third aisle though, he begins to accept that he is feeling a deal of malaise, leftover and originally risen by his anxiety during interacting with Lightning Dust. He’d tried to suppress it up until now, but it becoming a little too much for him to maintain sufficient focus.
Keto Profen had problem conditions of his own, anxiety issues in particular. His could get so bad to the point of making him feel ill, or just completely not right and uncomfortable like it was doing right now. He had medication of his own he frequently had to take, and that’s precisely what he does now.
He sets the clipboard down on an open segment of shelf and walks over to his small little desk in the back area and extracts his bottle of Lorazepam.
“What if I did even try to flirt with her . . . or ask her out, or any mare, ANY? I’d be so terrified, even somepony who’s not a Pharmacist knows the dose of these I’d have to be on isn’t safe.” He thinks to himself as he takes a single half-tablet, and then waits for it to begin affecting him and relieving his uneasiness so he can return to taking inventory for the day.
Author's Note
The first story I've ever posted up here. I've been out of fanfiction writing for while, but I'd like to consider myself back now, and rebooted with improved craft and more well flushed/thought-out ideas.
Keto Profen moved step by step along the line of one of the rows of pharmacy shelves, scribbling down on a tabled sheet of paper how much of each medication they currently had in supply. He was just about to begin taking stock of their proton pump inhibitors, when he heard the door to the pharmacy open and somepony step inside and begin walking up to the counter.
He quickly set the quill and paper on the shelf where he was about to start, and spun around hurrying out to the waiting counter.
“Hi, you came back?” He said.
“You said you'd give me a stronger dose of this. And, it's not doing anything.” She responded a few steps from the counter.
The difference wasn’t large by any means, but Lightning did seem just noticeably less sullen than she was when she first came in four days ago. Seeing, or at least hoping it was what he thought he saw, made Keto's hopes for her rise.
He nodded back, “Oh, yeah of course. You haven't had any reactions to it have you? Has anything started happening or feeling differently since you started taking it?”
She slowly shook her head a few times. “No, everything’s still the same.”
Keto's anxiety began to rise a little bit in worry of his concerningly depressed patient somehow ceasing to believe that medicine, or anything else for that matter, could help her.
He began to apologize and trying to keep her hope level.“Yeah-agh, I knew that was too low of a dose. And, the chemical uptake into your brain's a slow process, so it can take a-I'm sorry I forget to let you know that last time. But, it can take a week or two for you to really start experiencing the effects.”
She had nothing to give back but depressed sarcasm. “Pft, great, another week of getting to be like this.”
Keto practically winced at her words, feeling guilty for having forgotten to inform her of that particular aspect of antidepressants last time.
Lightning reached back behind her wing and pulled out the bottle had given her as her prescription, still holding 26 of its original 30 pills. She cocked her head sideways to place the bottle flat on the counter, at least until he stopped her.
“Hm? No, oh no you keep those. We may need them if we decide to raise your dose any further, to 225, then you'd just take one 150 capsule and one 75 at the same time since, well, there Are no 225 capsules.” He said.
Lightning accordingly picked the bottle back up, though without any effort at applying speed, and placed it back behind her wing. When she turned back to him, he suddenly noticed her eyelids were giving in to gravity by just a little bit, beginning to droop past the upper edge of her irises.
Keto Profen took a second to look into them, wondering whether the implied lack of sleep was from her depression, the Venlafaxine or both.
“Um, y-you look tired, somewhat. Have you been getting enough sleep?” He ended up asking.
“I'm fine with what I get.” Lightning responded in the kind of uncaring tone meant to push a question away.
The extent of her despondent attitude really worried Keto, and he began to wonder about how single-minded she had been about her dream that had been smashed. Still, he ddin’t remember her seeming too terribly sleep-deprived when she came in four days ago, which left him leaning more towards this one problem in particular being the well-known SSRI drug-class side effect.
“Wh-uh, did you start having any trouble sleeeping, or more trouble over the past few days than before?” He asked then.
Her response only grew bitter. “Yeah, but it doesn't make any difference. It's not like I have to stay well-rested anymore.”
“Everypony should always get enough rest,” Keto started up, “Your body needs sleep so it can spend your energy to do lots of important stuff it couldn't really do when you're awake: like purging out cell waste, rewiring your neuron connections, and . . . and a bunch of other things I'll stop mentioning before I make you bored.”
Bored was the only word Keto could think of. Lightning's face was starting to show disconnection from their conversation on top of her already-present despondence. Keto Profen began feeling his temperature rise with the embarrassment of his habitual digressing behavior. It was accompanied, of course, by the steady growth in presence of his anxiety.
“Whatever, it doesn't matter anymore, no matter why it did before.” She verbally pushed him away again.
“Well . . . even if it doesn't right n-I mean seem like it doesn't right now cause your spending your time right now em, uh emotionally recovering . . . I'm sorry, I know I sound stupid right now, but, what about whatever you're gonna do next?”
Keto chose carefully to use the word "do" instead of "try", which was about one of the only things he could think to do to try and come off as positive while having to think at the immediate speed of conversation. Though he began to grow hot under his fur from the embarrassment of his brief misadventure with the phrase "emotionally recovering."
His asking what she was going to do next though, ended up being enough to incite enough rage out of her to just break through her glum demeanor. “What’s next?! There isn’t anything else!”
Keto regrets his mistake immediately, but he only, though really cautiously tries to approach his question differently. “There's nothing else you've ever thought of doing . . . at all? Not even anything like a backup plan? Ah-I know, really, how depressing thinking about them can be, even when you're not depressed. But-”
At that, she snapped. “No! Ok? I didn't HAVE a backup plan, cause I didn't PLAN on failing!”
Lightning was almost at tears by the last word. The gathered, salty water even glimmered on the insides of her eyes, she managed to hold a fleeting, though very real glare at him. Her shoulders rise and her throat clearly trembles with each breath she draws in, holding her so near to sobbing. But out of the remanent flickers of her pride that refused to die, she held the complete cry back and kept it from coming to be.
Keto just cringed for the couple seconds while she yelled, and then his face is left afterwards unable to decide what expression of stress to give. Sensations of hot and cold flushed up and ran down him all over, his Sympathetic Nervous Systemic running haywire. He started picking his front right hoof just off the ground an quickly placing it back down, until he relented from it and just opened into a slow, regretful apology.
“Look . . . I'm not going to say I know. I don't know. I don't know what anything's like for you. But listen . . . I just, want, to help. I want to help you.”
Keto sighed and hung his head to look down at the counter top for a second, and then he raised it up again after a deep breath in and out.
“I'm just a Pharmacist; I'm not a therapist or as psychologist or a psychiatrist. We're not supposed to ask about things like how you feel, and we're not even supposed to talk to you this long either, any patient.” He said, and then paused a second before going on. “But . . . you said no pony else was; no pony else cares. So I'm gonna try. Even if the best thing I can do for you is shut up.”
Lightning Dust's breathing returned to normal over the course of Keto’s talking, and her expression slowly mellowed back out from being filled with distress to just appearing devoid of happiness. The tears that had begun to show receded, leaving behind just a dampness in the fur at the inside corners of her eyes. She kept her eyes down on the counter though, not feeling able to look at him. She wondered how long he could really keep going with her. When would he just give up like everypony else?
“Here, ah-I'll g-go take care of getting this raised for you.” Keto spoke up again, sounding as beaten-down as he felt.
Keto walked away whilst glancing back at her, heavily unsure of himself for leaving her right then. He went and found Lightning's file they had just started after her first prescription filling that Sunday. A small supply rewriting slips were on the table nearby, so he grabbed one and began carefully filling it out. It took a little time, even though he felt the rising heat of guilt the longer he took for keeping her waiting by herself back at the counter. He was just trying to be particularly considerate of how wrote out what he was doing and the reason he saw for it. The last thing he wanted was to have anything he did to help her revoked and undone later on part of his not filling out a form properly.
After he had finished and filed the alteration form, Keto walked amongst the medicine shelves and took a bottle of thirty 150mg capsules to give her. He arrived back at the counter, on the other side of which Lighting was now sitting. A bit of guilt pricked at him more, think she must have sat because she'd gotten tired of standing while waiting for him.
“I'm sorry. I'm really sorry that took so long. Ah-I probably should have just filled out the form earlier, before you came, even if I wasn't sure you were coming. I wouldn't have left you just standing there . . . like I did.” He tries to apologize for what he views as yet another screw-up on his part.
Lightning Dust got back up sluggishly, saying nothing, but not giving a glare or an interpersonally unpleasant look either. She stepped right up to the counter again and simply went to take the bottle from him.
Just then, the pharmacy door opened out front, and a little white filly with a faded-blue mane came in carrying a slip of paper in her mouth. Keto looked out at her, and Lightning turned half around to do the same, albeit more slowly. An adult mare, assumably the filly's mother, caught the door before it closed but held back from following her daughter completely up to the counter.
The little filly walked right up towards the counter on her own, but stopped just a step from being right next to Lightning Dust and looked from her to the counter a few times before sitting down to wait her turn, with her little piece of paper still in her mouth.
Lightning didn't glare at him in response to his turning his attention to the little filly, nor did she look at all impatient either, though he judged to hold apathy responsible for that.
“Errh, errh . . .” The filly started struggling standing up, trying to reach the top of the counter, but finding it's just out of her height range. For a few seconds, Lightning Dust just voidly watched, but then she unfolded a wing and took the prescription slip from the filly between two feathers and put it up on the counter for Keto.
“Thanks!” The little filly responded to Lightning’s action with an appreciative smile and a very cheery voice.
“Sure” Lightning said back in her hollow depressed voice.
The little filly then turned back to Keto Profen.
“I need to get this pres-kwipsin; I have avsma.” She told him.
Keto looked up past the filly at the mare standing just inside the doorway. She nodded when he made eye contact then smiled and nodded at her daughter when the filly glanced back at her mother for a sign of encouragement.
“Advair AND Zileuton? This has to be bad . . .” Keto unintentionally spoke aloud as he read what was on the slip for her.
“It gets hard for me to bweathe sometimes. I don't like it when that happens.” The filly responded to his unintended words.
“Yeah, nopony would.” He then said back after, trying to his best to sound empathetic and supporting.
“That was great, Snow Cloud.” Her mother suddenly said from a few steps away, having begun walking up to the counter to stand by her daughter.
“See mommy? I did it all by myself!” Snow Cloud, the little filly, exclaimed with beaming excitement.
Her mother gave a smile but then spoke in a slightly more soft, but still cautionary tone. “I saw sweetie, now calm down a little or you might start bothering the pony next to you.”
Lightning actually felt the drive to speak up, though not with much volume. “No, it's fine.”
She suddenly contemplated that she at least had enough energy and motivation to say that. For a few seconds until her thoughts were interrupted, she began thinking whatever she was taking that Keto gave her might be just started to begin doing something.
“Sure.” Was her simple, low response, shrugging her shoulders and looking away. Keto nodded and headed back away from the counter to the pharmaceutical shelves.
Just after Keto left, Snow Cloud then turned to Lightning Dust, with a smaller smile still on her face. “Thanks for helping me. And thanks for letting me get my medicine first.”
“Yeah, sure. It's not like I'm in a rush to go do anything anymore.” Lightning brushed off the gratitude for the good remarks it held about her.
“What's a rush?” Snow Cloud asked.
“It's the same as when somepony's in a hurry, sweetie.” Her mother gave her a short answer.
At her mother’s explanation, Snow Cloud’s expression suddenly dims and her smile and cheery voice both go away. “Oh, just like Spitfire from the Wonderbolts . . .” She says.
Lightning Dust cringed at the mention of Spitfire's name, and ended up having her head drawn back to the little filly.
“She walked right by after one their shows and said hey. I wanted to get her to autogwaph my Wonderboats poster . . . but all she did was just gib me this . . .” Snow Cloud said to Lightning, who she’d guessed was wondering what she meant.
The little filly pulls out a mass-hoof-autographed Spitfire photo. Lightning looks at the picture sickly, with narrowed, anger-laden eyes. It was a cheap piece of fanfare, a copy made from a few that Spitfire initially just mass-autographed by slapping each with an inked hoof over the course of nothing more than a few minutes.
“Yeah, she would . . .” Lightning responds to Snow Cloud’s story, voice laden with bitterness.
Keto heard everything just as he was coming back with a small, white paper bag. And the whole thought of it pissed him off too; the Wonderbolts, if there were any example of group of ponies letting their renown go to their heads, it was definitely them above all others.
Keto Profen suddenly had an idea strike him, an idea he hoped could possibly aid in slowly lifting Lightning up and out of her current state, as well as cheer the little filly up.
“Oh, Lightning Dust was Flying With the Wonderbolts just a little while ago. I know it's not the same thing, but, why don't you get her autograph?” He said to Snow Cloud, pointing his hoof at Lightning Dust.
The little filly gasped, “Oooo, could you, please? Can I really have YOUR autograph, Lightning Dust?” She begged.
Lightning Dust had perhaps never been in so much shock than she was at that single moment, not even when the badge on her uniform was stripped off of her, and she gave Snow Cloud the most confused, peculiar look she had ever given any pony.
“Pleeeaaase?” Snow Cloud begged again, beginning to plead with her eyes too.
Lightning's face returned halfway to normal, though her eyes were still shimmering. It was a look of questioning now.
The words took more than a few seconds to form, but Lightning did speak out with a question. “You want my autograph?”
“Here.” Keto said to Lightning, quickly grabbing a quill to pass off to her.
Lightning Dust looked over with a huge amount of uncertainty still lingering in her expression. Keto tried to encourage her by brightening his own, since he couldn't really talk with the quill in his mouth. His came off looking awkward, in a way, as most non-reactive expressions of the like did with him, but something about it ended up making her take the quill from him.
Snow Cloud's eyes widened and glimmered at the thrilling expectation Lightning taking the pen implied, and only changed to a self-searching panic for about a second when she realized she didn't have anything to be signed. But her foalish imagination quickly resolved that.
“Oh, I know! Sign me! Sign me!” She said excitedly.
The little filly held open her right wing and reached it forward toward Lightning, who raised a single eyebrow in renewed confusion. But she signed the little filly's wing all the same. It wasn't the first time she had given one; in the past she had inflated her own image up like Rainbow Dash had, along with her ego just the same, and had encouraged meager fanships of her own in her hometown. Though . . . this felt different somehow. Was it because she felt like what she did?
Just in that moment then, when Snow Cloud looked over at Lightning Dust's illegible, black-inked name on her right wing: a portion of apathy lifted off from Lightning Dust, noticeable enough in her eyes for even Keto Profen to see. It happened when the purely ecstatic smile came over that little filly's face, looking at the autograph she had given her.
“Here's her medication and discus inhaler.” Keto said quietly to the little filly’s mother, not wanting to distract Snow Cloud from her boisterous excitement. He slid the little white paper bag across the counter to Snow Cloud’s mother, containing her daughter’s discuss inhaler and medicative pill capsules, and then finally oriented himself back towards Lightning Dust again.
“Thanks so much.” Her mother said gratefully, and just as quietly. She grabbed the bag with her mouth then tucked it under her wing.
“Ok Snow Cloud, we have to go.” She told her daughter, returning to a normal speaking volume.
Snow Cloud showed a face of disappointment, but she didn’t complain. “Ok mommy.”
Keto felt compelled to do what little he could think of to try to re-raise her spirits.“Hey, you have to get new refills almost every week, you'll run into her again.” He let her know.
“Really?” Snow Cloud asked hopefully.
“Yup. I mean, if everything goes good for her with her medication she won't exactly be coming in here THAT often, b-but still . . .” He assured her, and compulsively clarified himself.
Keto felt a flush of cold regret run down him for saying "if" with Lightning Dust standing right there instead of something more positive for her to hear, like "once" or "when."
“You come here to get medicine too?” Snow Cloud questioned Lighning Dust.
Lightning answered grudgingly, looking away. “. . . Yeah.”
“I didn't think you wuh sick.” Snow Cloud’s curiosity continued.
Keto ended up acting on the urge to speak in and intervene before Lightning Dust was made to feel embarrassed or awkward. “Sheee-has to, uh, get something different, not sick medicine.”
“Huh? But I thought she was your fwiend?” Snow Cloud suddenly changed the direction of her incessant questions.
“I don't have any more friends.” Lightning muttered.
Snow Cloud’s face was shot across with shock. “But . . . but . . .” She couldn’t even say anything first.
“Isn't he your friend?” The poor little filly was finally able to ask, and tried, it seemed, to sound encouraging as she did. “Cause he was happy to see you, and talking to you.” She added on her reasoning.
“Uhh, actually I . . . kinda think I've been talking a little too much for her.” Keto Profen admitted his own suspicions.
Lightning looked over at him with a small bit of shock, and a sad awkwardness. She just then began to specifically understand what she had been feeling earlier the whole time: even if his going on and on about everything she should do and care about, and though some of what he said she couldn't understand, she still had at least liked hearing him talk to her because it meant that one pony at least did care about her.
“Come on, sweetie, we really have to go; daddy will worry if his little snowy angel isn't there for lunch.” Snow Cloud’s mother suddenly told her daughter after looking up at the clock up above the counter.
“Ok.” Her daughter agreed again.
Suddenly, far out of the range of Lightning Dust's expectancy, she felt Snow Cloud squeeze her forelegs in a quick hug, smiling.
She let Lightning go and turned her head to Keto Profen as she walks away to go with her mother.
“And you too mistor pharmacist!” She said to him with a smile also.
Keto couldn't help himself from giving a true smile. He was socially awkward and whatnot, but something about being called "mister pharmacist" in the adorable voice of a little filly or colt just shot him with happiness.
Lightning Dust was still left with a look of complete and utter lack of understanding at the little filly having called her a nice pony.
“Lightning? I h-have your new dose here.” Keto said all he could immediately think to, wanting both to tell her such and to regain her attention.
Lightning turned back to him whilst slowly returning her face to a regular depressed expression. It really did begin to seem to him that her expression was resembling one far more like that of common depression, and no longer the life-downtrodden face that had clung to her since Keto Profen first saw her.
“Lightning Dust?” He asked with his rising curiosity.
“What was she talking about? Nice Pony?” She asked aloud, with complete lack of comprehension coming out in her voice.
“Uh . . . well, you were pretty nice to her. I mean, as she saw it. I thought so too.” Keto tried his best to say, although unsure of exactly how to answer her not having expected what she asked of all things.
He saw, and decided to try his best to add on and restate things. “Well, you helped her without her even asking. AND you autographed her wing; she'll probably idolize you now just because of that.” Keto ended his continuation with another genuine smile, believing in the likely outcome he'd mentioned.
“But that's . . . I didn't care! It's not like I did any of it because I was nice.” She denied.
“Th-then, why did do it, everything?” Keto asked out of true, utter confusion.
Lightning found she didn’t have any answer, that she herself didn’t even know, or rather didn’t have any other explanation to offer.
“Hmpf! She deserved an autograph . . . from somepony, I know better than anypony else she's never gonna get one from Spitfire. But that's . . . there's no way I'm nice.” She responded after a few seconds of silence.
She turned her head away, her old face of deep-depression coming back.
Keto started trying to ask her why she was saying that in particular, but without being able to finish. “Wa-wait, ah why, exactly? I mean, you've been-”
She breathed deeply while he spoke, as her eyes narrowed and she quivered all over several times . . . until she verbally exploded. “Because I don't care about other ponies! I don't care about anypony at all. Cause I'm RECKLESS!”
Keto Profen recoiled back from her explosive outburst, heartrate rapidly accelerating. He waited for her rage to come with a second wave, but instead found her only standing there gritting her teeth, trying to still show anger even as tears rolled from each eye.
She went on, harshly bitter and crying. “I'm reckless; that's why I got kicked out. I wouldn't be reckless if I thought about anypony else."
An understanding, or at least a percieved one suddenly molded into place for Keto Profen, piecing itself together from everything she'd just said and the small bit Psychology courses Pharmacy School had required him to undergo.
“I've been like that before.” He said, pure, unefforted empathy coming out in his voice, and Lighting looked eye to eye with him, ready to hear whatever else he intended to say.
“Somepony . . . shows you something they think is so awful about you, and you believe them, and end up somehow just from that thinking you must just be a horrible pony altogether.” He said what he had alluded to.
Lightning's insides were overturned. Keto may not have been intending to have anywhere near the impact on her he was having, but he was. Her eyes were sent gaping wide for several seconds. The realization gripped her that Keto had just spoken out her current reality, and one she had been made by what happened to believe about herself.
“Uh . . . agh.” Keto opened his mouth to try and say something, anything, but he couldn’t formulate any words right then and there.
Keto let his eyes fall closed and his head drop to hang. While his head was down, Lightning Dust robotically picked up the new bottle intended for her, this time actually tucking it under a wing. She did turn her head back to him for a few seconds, but without looking directily at him, and without saying anything. Really, she didn't know what to, she was still being washed over by the realization he had brought with his words, intentionally or not.
The two of them both spoke at the same time, with him saying “sorry” and her saying “thanks.”
She turned away and began to leave, just as Keto's head shot back up after processing her saying thanks. It sounded kind of hollow, but not as much as her voice normally had been. Was it just instinctive, or had it been genuine?
Keto suddenly took in the full realization that Lightning is about to leave, and started rapidly rambling off everything he could think of that he should have told or asked her. “Uh, don't forget to take it with food! A-and uh, make sure to check back in uh-sometime; soon! And if those sleep troubles get worse from the side effects, just . . . remember I can . . . give you something. All I want to do is help, however I can.”
He looked out at her as she stops right in front of the Pharmacy door, about to add on to what he had just said, willing to include shutting up again . . . until she spoke, for the last time before she left that day.
“Don’t shut up . . .” She said without completely looking back.
After that, she walked out the door, and a combination of first just surprise and then happiness fought and suppressed the anxiety Keto's own condition had been driving him to feel off and on throughout much of their interaction.
He was really helping her, or at least getting through to her, somehow. Even just by being himself and screwing up left and right in his speech, AND not relenting from his speech even when his topical vocabulary was obviously starting to transcend her knowledge. But now, at least . . . she seemed to like it.
Keto Profen desperately wanted to help her emotionally recover. He wanted to be able to see her when she was her real self, and not lugged down by sorrow.
He wanted to see her happy.
Author's Note
For returning readers: I've made a few changes since the first chapter. I've gotten rid of my former inconsistencies with tense-usage, and have made sure the story's narration is strictly past-tense. I hope this helps out, since people were making note of it last time. Be aware that I'm not flawless at editing, nor is anybody, so there may be a random sentence here or there that I missed when I ran over everything converting tenses.
I hope everypony enjoys reading.
Caring
“Oh, ma'am would you mind staying a moment to answer a few questions?” the pharmacy supervisor asked the patient Keto had just helped.
The mare shook her head at the supervisor's request. “Sorry, but my brother's little colt is having his eighth birthday party today, and there's no way I'm going to leave my nephew without a birthday cake, since I'm supposed to be the one bringing it,” she explained.
The supervisor waved a hoof before she replied, “oh no, don't worry, it's all fine. It was just a service and patient consultation review, it's completely voluntary.”
The mare smiled thankfully and turned around to walk out the Pharmacy door, at which Keto Profen, standing some ways back internally gave a massive sigh of relief. The questions were supposed to be review questions about him, given it was six months since he'd started at the Pharmacy and they had to do a thorough review of his patient consultations and services to decide whether or not to keep him on for the long term.
Of course, the concept of being reviewed terrified him, he had been literally feeling his heart rise up his chest to bottom of his throat over and over with every patient the Pharmacy supervisor attempted to question. Even worse, he hadn't been able to allow himself to take any his anxiety medication, given any Benzodiazepine would almost certainly make one sluggish or fatigued to at least some minor extent.
“Well, I'm thinking we might just have to extend your review into tomorrow; it seems like nopony wants to talk today,” his supervisor said to him regretfully.
She came towards and walked passed him, returning to the back office where she usually was. “Sorry,” Keto said as she was heading back. “Oh, don't apologize for everypony's busy lives. Besides, this more than partially my fault; I did pick the day after all, and my luck with happenings and having things go as planned has always been worse than most. I'm just glad I've never had any real mishaps with anypony's medication occur while I've been here,” she insisted, and then finally walked into the office, but she did leave the door open, so as to hear if anypony else came in and spoke with Keto.
Keto Profen was looking over at his own medication at that moment, and in the same he gazed up at the clock for several seconds as well. It was almost five o'clock, and the board over on the wall said his day was over at five-thirty. He knew it took around twenty minutes for the effects of taking Lorazepam to begin to onset: both benefits and side effects. So, since it was so close to the end of his shift he decided he could finally go ahead.
He narrowed his eyes intently and walked back to the employee table behind all of the Pharmaceutical shelves. Just as he reached the table though, the little bell hanging from the front door rang as the door was opened and Keto was made to stop and turn around. Once he had, and began heading back to the counter, he saw that it was actually Lightning Dust who had just entered the Pharmacy, and his face, in turn, brightened with her arrival.
“Hi,” he greeted her with a small smile, the first genuinely happy voice he’d been able to use all day.
“Hey,” she said back as she came up.
Keto slowed down in step just before reaching the counter. His eyes did widen for a second, although they quickly went back to normal. She had actually greeted him back, and not just looked away or gone straight to a demand like she had done her first and second time visiting the Pharmacy. Lightning's look was even revealing of her depression having been reduced by some chunk. She was even flat-lipped, and wholely open-eyed, as opposed to her former low-eyelids, sullen expression from her past two visits.
“Wow, uh, the Venlafaxine's taking a good effect; at least I think I see,” he said.
“Yeah,” she responded, “I'm feeling better. I mean, it's not like I'm the same as I was before . . . I know I'll probably never get like that again. But I don't feel anything like I did right after, or even when I came here the first time.”
Her expression did dim when she alluded to her expulsion from the Wonderbolt Academy, but that wasn't exactly surprising to Keto. He was just flooding with mixture of relief and happiness at how well she seemed to be doing so quickly; it had been a week since her second visit to the Pharmacy when he had raised her dose.
“Uh, so, why did come back in so early?” he asked, only suddenly realizing she should have had another week of medication left.
“We can't raise your dose for another . . . ah-I mean, really I'd just rather prefer to have to get used to the medication itself for another week at the middle dose,” he explained, somewhat.
“Huh? No, it's . . . nothing like that,” she said, trailing off a bit at the end and looking away.
Lightning kept her head turned away for a few seconds, looking down at an angle and biting the inside of her lip, something Keto Profen thought resembled somepony struggling to say or admit something they really don't want to. Though of course, her depression that still remained dampened the clarity of any and every other would-be expression, including this one.
“I'm not really getting any good sleep anymore,” she finally admitted, “it's a lot worse now than when I came in last time.”
“Yeah, th-that's definitely the side effect of the Venlafaxine,” he confirmed for her, as he had suggested last time.
“Wait, were . . . you didn't come here because you wanted to stop taking it, did you?” he asked in a sudden, mild panic.
“No, I was . . .” she began to tell him, though she hesitated again which only ended up allowing him a second or two to calm down from his sudden scare.
She sighed, and then said, “I was gonna ask if you could give me anything: to help me sleep?”
Keto had to take a second to allow his eyes to slightly widen and then return to normal. He hadn't at all been expecting that from her, especially given how she'd reacted to him trying to ask about her sleep last week.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I can. I mean it's directly correlated to your pre-established medicative regimen; we're just trying to alleviate a symptom, not starting another treatment for a different condition altogether,” he explained happily.
“So . . . can you give me something, or do I have to go back my doctor?” she still asked, seeming confused at the particular manner in which he’d spoken.
“Ah-no, th-that's what I was saying, that I can write it. Agh,” he replied, wanting to face-hoof himself but keeping from it, “sorry I started talking like that again. I know it was only for, like, a paragraph or a couple sentences, but, uh . . .”
“It's not any big deal. I'm fine, just . . . please get me the medicine, or . . . sleep stuff; whatever,” she cut him off to say.
“Oh yeah, don't worry, there's more than enough hypnotics I'm familiar with that I can give you,” he promised.
“So . . . that's like your word for sleep pills?” she asked.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, ah-sorry about that, again. Hypnotics is the word we use, but everypony else just calls them whatever, just like with basically every other drug class,” he answered.
Keto was struck by a thought for a brief few seconds after he'd spoken. The fact that Lightning had even asked that question was enough to show that she was interested in what he'd said for one reason or another, which meant that her depression and her recent memory of being stripped of her opportunity to become a Wonderbolt weren't completely consuming her thoughts anymore, or at least he hoped he could take it as a sign of such.
“You can talk like that if you want to,” she suddenly said back in a snappy voice, “I've never heard some of the words you're using but I think I'm smart enough to at least guess that you're talking about doing giving me something to help me sleep.”
Keto wasn't sure whether it had been just an edgy comment or actual biting anger that had just come from her. Either way, he felt a twist of regret begin to knot itself up in him; another one. He flattened his lip line and pressed his teeth together for a second.
“Yeah, I'll . . . uh, make up my mind,” he promised, laden with momentary guilt.
That time it was Lightning who felt something. It may have been guilt . . . maybe just a tiny speck of it. She didn't exactly know; guilt of all things wasn't exactly the emotion she was most used to feeling. But . . . maybe falling from the highest point she had ever climbed all the way down to lowest level of the depression she had succumbed to had finally left her open to other things.
“Ah-I just need to know some stuff first,” he said, and then asked, “uh, you don't . . . drink, do you?”
Lightning raising her eyebrow at the question was all but reflexive, regardless of the fact she would have done so anyways. “No. I . . . WAS, a top-class athelete. I did everything I could to keep myself in perfect flying condition. There’s no way I’d ever let myself do anything like that,” she answered.
Keto made sure to smile at that answer. He had never really had any liking for the whole concept of drinking, ever since he was colt, even. Though it was something rather rare among ponies in comparison to some of the world’s other races, he was still required to ask, for his patients’ safest.
“So, nothing? Never?” he asked for affirmation one more time, at which she shook her head in response. Her face still showed disgust at the idea even of the accusation, or at least what she would have viewed as one.
“Well good,” he said, “then it's definitely safe for me to let you take mild CNS depressants . . .”
Lightning tried to withold herself, but she couldn't. “L-look,” she starting asking, though somewhat hesitantly, “I know I said I could just figure stuff out, but what are you talking about right now? I'm already depressed.”
That assumption on Lightning’s part shot Keto Profen into another flash-panic. “N-n-no, no, ah-it's a different depressed,” he tried his best to remain clear in explaining, “it's not like that, that's emotional depression that you're thinking about, this is a different . . . uh, version, of the word that means more like stop, or block something.”
Keto suddenly realized that he had been motioning gestures of the process with his hoof, at which he quickly put it back down on the floor and his face turned a light red under his fur. They weren't restricted from holding their hooves above the counter or anything, it was only really something Keto Profen had always just felt out of place doing.
“Ah-I'm sorry,” he began, “for that, uh, misconception, not for speaking with any pharmacological words I used at all though, I guess, since y-you said not to be for that . . .”
He couldn’t avoid a self-aggravated sigh before he went on to explain things, “I'm so much worse than usual today; it's because I'm getting evaluated.”
Were she her old self, pre-wonderbolt-expulsion, Lightning would have spoken some aggressive encouragement, since despite paying attention mainly to herself, she did lend her positive, though often obnoxious enthusiasm to ponies she liked well enough. But, in her present state the thought of what she would have done only crossed her mind and hung at its edge for a moment, but nothing more.
“I'll stop keeping you waiting and go get you something,” he said as he turned around. “I'll make sure it's whatever you can take that'll give you the least amount of trouble,” he promised, looking back over his shoulder at her as he began to head to the shelves.
“Um, you know you can still ask me stuff like you said you were going to. I can get over being mad . . . it's this stupid depression I can't stop,” she made herself say before he was out of range.
Keto felt a deep tug of sympathy at what she said, and the dulling of her voice as she reached the last of it. The fact that she'd basically said she wasn't really angry him also felt a fresh spark of hope for their relationship: Pharmacist-Patient or otherwise.
“Well, there isn't really anything else I need to know,” he said, turning back around, “unless you started another medication at some other pharmacy and haven't told us yet.”
Lightning's slightly puzzled look gave Keto the answer he all but already knew, although she still spoke to his surprise.
“Wait . . . you like us that much?” he had to ask.
“Well, yeah . . . you,” she said, much to his shock again. “Nopony else understands, you're the only one that, kind of, understands . . . or cares . . .” she went on, looking down at the ground.
Keto was truly surprised at first, at the mentioning of it specifically being him that she liked, but then that ended up giving way into an awkward sympathy of wanting to contradict her about nopony caring about her, for her own sake. But for a moment he couldn't think of anything to say, until he allowed himself to resort to the obvious. “Well, what about your parents?” Keto asked.
Lightning's expression almost instantly went foul, or at least half as much as Keto guessed it might have been had it been prior to her Wonderbolt Academy expulsion. She kept the expression but turns her head away to the side again, staring almost grudgingly off at the wall.
Keto sighed deeply while he hung his head and covered his face with his wings for a few seconds until he heard Lightning's voice again.
“Yeah, they don't,” she said in such a sure voice.
“Well, ah—“ Keto tried to speak, but really had nowhere verbally to go.
“They don't, but you do, so obviously I'll keep coming here; until . . . I'm done with this, whenever. How long does all this take to get over?” she said and asked quickly, shoving her parents out of the equation.
“Well I . . . what? It's not like an infection,” he began attempting to explain, “ah . . . it lasts however long you keep thinking about everything. I mean, uh-agh . . . uh . . . hold on . . .”
“Ah-I'm sorry, but I CAN'T answer that,” he had to tell her the truth, “it would already be different for every pony to begin with because nopony's brain is the same, and even what you're actually through all depends on what happened to you. Then what you do afterwards is . . . what drives everything else, kind of. It . . . depends,” he finished, just hoping it would be enough for her to understand somewhat.
“Great . . . forever,” she resigned herself in clear misery.
“I'm never gonna just forget what happened!” she protested.
“No, not forget, just . . .” Keto Profen spoke slowly, and to a certain degree desparately, not wanting to mislead her, “when you go on to something else; once you don't just think about all the time anymore. It only goes on for so long as it's all you think about, or what you think about more than anything else.”
“That's probably STILL gonna be forever. There's no way I'll ever be able to stop thinking about it all the time,” Lighting just asserted again.
“ . . . it was my dream . . .” she said, as close to a whimper as she herself was probably capable of coming, and speaking out of pure and utter desponadancy.
Keto Profen was emotionally cracking inside; the way she’d just spoken had jabbed and wrenched into his heart like a crooked shard of glass. He just wanted to help her so badly, but he had never tried to help anypony with something like this before, even outside of healthcare. And even so, he'd only been practicing pharmacy for the past year, and this wasn't like any other problem he'd normally had to help a patient face; it wasn't like a miss-filled prescription, or a worry about the interactions of one drug with another, or any of the just general things he was always asked. Lightning was so sad, and her life for the immediate time period, and for the whole as she saw, was broken. He knew how and what to use to treat illnesses with drugs, and even how, pharmacologically, to at least alleviate some of the depth of her depression as he'd been doing through Venlafaxine or any number of other SSRIs . . . but he didn't know anything about how to fix her life. In fact, he wondered then if anypony really knew anything about fixing ponies' lives.
“I'm sorry I can't help you anymore than I'm trying. Please . . . please believe that I don't want you to feel like this,” he begged.
“I'm just a pharmacist,” he said, looking down on himself, “all I can really do is keep helping you lower the severity of it . . . and try to talk to you and help, but I don't think I'm any good at that.”
“Huh-ugh wait, that's,” Lighting began to respond, confused at first, then feeling guilty and in the end feeling both “. . . agh, not how I meant that to sound, I guess.”
Lightning had intended to say exactly what she had, but she hadn't meant it for the purpose of trying to sadden Keto any further. However . . . caring about her effect on other ponies wasn't something all that common to her, so though she knew what she felt, she just didn't know how to say it.
“Why don't you go get me my hypno-what pills instead of listening anymore to me? You're starting to look pretty bad,” she suggested, allowing herself the realization of just how distressed her intolerableness was making him.
Keto tried to straighten his thoughts out enough to think about what she'd just said, but he was too flustered; that process was starting to break down.
“Just go, listening to me anymore's only gonna make you feel worse,” she insisted glumly.
“Lo-look, and . . . I don't want you to end up feeling something like this too, since you've been really trying to help me so much,” she said right after.
He remained there a few seconds, but finally just let his eyes drift down and turned about to head back into the pharmaceutical shelves. After Keto Profen had gone back, the pharmacy supervisor emerged from her office and eagerly trotted up to the service counter.
“Good afternoon Miss, please pardon my jumping in to talk to you here real fast but I'd just like to ask if you'd be willing and able to stay after for a few minutes and answer some questions about your experience having Keto Profen as your Pharmacist?” she asked Lightning Dust.
Lightning hadn't been expecting her appearance, nor really the appearance of anypony else, so she took a second or two longer than normal to take everything she'd just heard in. One eyebrow went up, but then they both went down, and her eyes unfocused as she thought considerably about it. She would have said no in the past; she didn't care for answering the questions even right then when she'd been asked to. But, the questions or survey or whatever were something alone to her; that she'd didn't care at all about. They were something other than . . . than Keto himself.
She looked out into the rows of shelves and watched him carrying a small bottle over to one of the tables against the side wall. He looked so intent about what he was doing. She felt something even though it wasn't yet strong: she wanted to help him too, after how much he'd tried for her.
“Yeah, fine,” Lightning willingly agreed.
“Oh thankyou so much!” the supervisor said with nearly ecstatic delight, “we've been getting every patient that's in hurry all day today so nopony's been able to wait around and speak a little. I'll come back when your consultation with Keto is done.”
***
Keto only took another couple minutes. Lightning could see him clearly and watched him transfer a number of tiny blue pills from the larger bottle he'd grabbed off the shelves into one of the stereotypical transparent-orange prescription bottles. Then he wrapped a freshly printed label around the prescription bottle, which she knew had her name, whatever what was in the bottle was called, and some other numbers and stuff she didn't really care about. Right after, he took the supply bottle back to its place on the third row of shelves, and then finally came back out to her.
“Here, uh-you just need to sign this,” he said, sliding both her prescription bottle and a sheet of paper with a quill.
“There wasn't anything like this the other times,” she said regarding it before she picked up the quill in her mouth.
“Yeah, that was from your doctor though,” he explained, “and I only raised your dosage. All that it need was just for me fill out some pages of legal paperwork and write up my reasoning for altering your dose. This one I prescribed for you myself, so I have to have you sign this to prove that you were a real patient I gave this to and didn't just write it up for a fake patient and then took it myself.”
Lightning still gave the paper the same look, although she did sign it.
“Take it an hour before you're gonna go to sleep; just one. And just make sure you're not really moving around a whole bunch after you take it,” he instructed her after she slid him back the paper and pulled the bottle over to herself.
“I'm sorry for all the trouble I was today, or might have been . . . or if I wasn't and I'm actually just being really annoying by always thinking I'm screwing something up, then I'm sorry for that too,” he apologized himself in circle again as Lightning looked like she was readying to leave.
“Yeah, it's alright,” she said weakly, though intending to be reassuring.
“I just want to help you, Lightning. I don't want to have to watch you stay in the kind of place you've been in. I've already said I've been somewhere near there myself . . . just different,” he said, then fell into a pause until he was just able to say two more words.
“I care,” he said.
It felt awkward to say, for him. He really did care, but stuff more towards that end wasn't anything he said particularly often. Although, none of his patients were in anywhere near the same kind of despondency as Lightining Dust.
Lightning's face changed after he said that though, almost to the point of brightening up. Her expression returned all the way to being flat, without a hint sadness, although of course there was no hint of anything resembling happiness or joy either. But, it was a lift for her, back up from where she'd been falling back down towards over their conversation.
“Th-thanks . . . really, uh-a lot,” she said, just before they were both jolted.
“Keto!” the pharmacy supervisor called the Pegasus Stallion, drawing his reluctant attention. “You're off!,” she told him, “your shift's up. Sorry you had to do another eight-hour day, Dr Bin Number catching heigh-fever from his vacation to Zebrica's really pressed my hoof on some things,” she apologized to him as she relieved him from his shift.
“It's fine; I'm alright,” he promised, then looked back at Lightning one last time. “. . . Well, goodbye, for now,” he said, “I hope you'll be able to enjoy getting better sleep. You can always still come in if anything's wrong . . .”
Keto eventually had to turn about and walk away to take the day's final inventory. He kept looking over his shoulder though, both at Lightning Dust for the sake of her, and . . . because he knew his supervisor was interviewing her as part of his evaluation.
His face became sour as he went through the shelves, turning so from the shame he felt for thinking so quickly that Lightning of all his patients would say bad things about him after repetitively professing that he was the only pony who cared about or remotely understood what she felt like. He was going to need a whole milligram of Lorazepam after today; Keto knew it. But, since he'd made it this far through an anxious, stressed day again he decided to just finish out the final inventory and wait to take his own medication until he got home.
“So,” the supervisor began questioning Lightning, after Keto was definitively out of the are, “mainly this meant to be a lot more open for you say as much as you want in your own way. We don't really like just asking patients generic questions and just having them tell us either yes or no.”
The supervisor paused and waited, assumedly for Lightning to respond with any questions of her own. But, when she didn't, the supervisor went right ahead and began.
“Sooo, I guess I'll just be really concise about this: how do you like having Dr Profen as your pharmacist?” she asked.
Lightning didn’t really have any idea what she should say, and she was quiet for a few more seconds, but eventually she decided for Keto’s sake to go ahead and put together whatever words came about in her thoughts. “He's pretty good. I mean, I trust what he says, and I do like him a lot. He's . . . been the only pony I've even talked to since the start of all this that's actually even cared, and he kind of understands what I'm going through,” she told the supervisor.
“Oh, really?” she asked with eager hope.
“Yeah,” Lightning went on, “and, he's always super careful about everything cause . . . cause he doesn't want anything to go wrong for me. And he talks to me every time I come in here, since I don't have anypony else to.”
The supervisor's look only grew more and more pleased, and she even repressed her own urge to speak a few words here and there, instead just letting Lighting continue on.
“. . . he's . . . also tried to Really help me,” Lightning said.
“Hm? Um, what do you mean, exactly?” the supervisor asked, confused.
“He's tried a lot to try to get me to think about other stuff,” Lightning explained, “besides just being like this. I gave some little filly an autograph the last time I was in here; it was his idea. But, it really helped make me start to feel better later. He . . . acts weird sometimes, and he's always kind of worried he's not saying stuff right or not trying to help me hard enough, but if he wasn't the way he is . . . I don't what would have happened with me by now.”
***
The supervisor went looking for Keto Profen straight away once she was done with Lightning Dust, and she managed to catch him just as he was posting up the filled-out inventory sheet before he left.
Keto, when he saw her, couldn't help but feel a cold, clenching feeling of dread. Although he calmed himself down internally as best he could once he noticed that she was smiling.
“Keto Profen! I've never had a patient of any of my Pharmacists say so many wonderful things about any one of them before, and for acclamations that positive to be coming from a pony suffering through the kind of depression she's been . . .” she told him, in some kind proud, approving disbelief.
“So . . . e-everything's good, then? I can stay here?” he asked tenatively.
The shock that came over his supervisor's face was greater than any Keto Profen had ever seen, and she found herself barely able to even answer his question. “Y-y-yes! A-and Keto, you have to be able to put at least Some belief in yourself?” she answered.
“Yeah, everypony's always saying that,” he replied, staring off and thinking.
“I basically never had any to begin with,” he told her, and then spoke about Lightning Dust, “but she used to have a lot, in herself, and right now I'm a little more concerned about helping her get hers back.”
“That was something she mentioned, and in all my honesty, Keto Profen, I envy how much you do care. Please, keep being the way you are, at least that part of your way, for all our patients' sakes,” his supervisor begged of him before she headed back towards her office.
“Oh,” she said, quickly spinning around one more time and catching him just before he walked out to go home, “and I think you should know, at least: she seems to think nicely of you.”
Author's Note
Well, here's chapter 3, sorry it took so long; I just finished my Molecular Biology course I was taking this summer (our summer courses are much more condensed than regular-semester courses). But now I have nothing but free time until BronyCon, so don't worry. I'm working on chapter 4 of this right now and chapter 8 of Hurricane Paradigm will also be up soon too (the only reason I've been uploading those so fast is because most of Hurricane Paradigm was already written, as I've been writing it for months).
Yes, the next chapter will take place outside of the Pharmacy, and will also feature some references that will serve as tie-ins to another fic I'll be writing soon about Screw Loose and Doctor Stable.
Any questions just ask in the comments per usual.
Lightning had shown up after all at the end of the day. Fudge Pop was in the midst of closing down her vending wagon, so Lightning Dust knocked on the open doorframe.
“Just one minute,” the vendor mare responded upon noticing Lightning, “let me finish closing everything up.”
Lightning stood by out of the way and waited while Fudge Pop finished up her end-of-the-day routine. She'd already pulled the cover closed over the service window and was placing the cold-trapping seals back over each of the ice cream bins.
Fudge Pop spoke up to Lightning Dust as she went about sealing the bins. “All of these are labeled by color so take a look as much as you want now and don't forget nopony really ever comes early in the morning so you'll probably have some time to check again tomorrow too.”
“I should be able to tell,” Lightning said in her new neutral tone.
“Oh, yeah I forgot. You said you used to get ice cream here a lot, didn’t you?” Fudge Pop responded.
“When I was a filly,” Lightning confirmed, “my sister took me here a lot.”
Fudge Pop suddenly stopped in the middle of washing the ice cream scooping spoons. She gave an odd look over at Lightning Dust. “You lived in Canterlot?” She asked.
“My parents and my sister are all unicorns . . . so, yeah,” Lightning answered.
“Oh,” Fudge seemed decently surprised for a moment, “well if you think you still remember all the flavors well enough then.”
Fudgepop stepped past the ice cream lids over to the little wooden counter next to them where it seemed everything necessary for serving it was kept somehow without taking up that much space, despite the counter's size.
“The cones are over here,” she explained, “and so are the are the ice cream scoop and the sprinkle shovel. Oh! And don't forget about the hot fudge and the whipped cream! They’re under here on this little secret shelf. Had to hide them since I’ve had little fillies and colts reach over the window counter and run away with them before.”
The older mare turned about to the wagon's other side to open a cupboard revealing the small shelf holding several bottles of each of the toppings she'd just reminded herself of. She took one of each out and placed both of them up on the counter next to the cones and scoops. “You can keep them out here if you want, but just keep a really close eye on them. And, I mean REALLY close.”
“Alright,” she started to finalize, “well there's not much else to the little place so if you don't need to ask me about anything else I'm just going to go ahead and leave the key with you and go catch the train to Ponyville. I know it's not going to be anything like when . . . she still really knew who she was, but I'm still ready to finally go see my sister again.”
Lightning didn't look at the mare, made too uneasy by the thought of how much time it'd been since she'd seen her own sister.
“You said you had a sister,” Fudge Pop drew Lightning’s attention back again, “you know you should probably go and see her too, after I'm back to run the wagon in a few days.”
Lightning couldn’t keep herself from the sting that suggestion brought. She hadn’t seen Lyra in . . . a long time, but Lyra lived in Ponyville, and even the chance the going there would bring wasn’t an option. “Yeah . . . she doesn't exactly live someplace I can go.” Lightning told her. She chose to remain unspecific about where she meant, especially given that the ice cream mare herself was literally about to travel there in a short half hour train ride.
“Oh,” Fudge Pop looked genuinely saddened for Lightning’s sake, “I'm sorry to hear she's so far away. Well, there's always writing, at least. Or maybe if it is just that you're too down on your luck right now to make to her, you could always write and see if she could come see you.”
A kindhearted smile was the last thing Lightning saw from Fudgepop as the ice cream mare finally left the wagon to hurry off for the train station. Lightning Dust lingered in the vending wagon for a little while after the other mare had left. She did spend some time studying over the small bit of what she'd need to know for tomorrow, but most of the remainder she spent wishing she could see Lyra again. Why? Why did her sister have to live in Ponyville of all places?
***
Fudgepop hadn't been off; Lightning had gone through the entire morning until about eleven o’clock without seeing more than two customers. Only now, going on noon was she actually even seeing fillies and colts beginning to be brought to the little ledge-side park, running around and playing tag while the parents sat down amongst the picnic table, talking like boring adults.
Lightning stood, head in the window, ready. And surely enough the little young ponies got tired at some point, and playing tagging shifted into begging and badgering their parents for bits to buy ice cream with. And of course, none of the parents refused, only giving resistance long enough to lecture their foals about not eating too much of the treat.
Four of them rushed over to Lightning at once, a purple pegasus colt being the first to skid to a stop in front of the open window.
“And whatta you want?” Lightning tried her best to sound somewhat pleasant, forcing herself to almost smile.
“Chocolate! Double chocolate?” The colt demanded with exploding enthusiasm.
She couldn't avoid raising an eyebrow at him before turning aside to extract a cone.
“Hey, shouldn't you be a unicorn?” Another, younger colt behind the first asked, peering around the first to see that Lightning was a pegasus.
Lightning dropped the cone she had clenched between her teeth. The question came at her so sideways she didn't even exactly know how to take it, let alone what the little foal even meant by it. She looked back to see the one who'd asked examining her wings, just surprised, apparently at her being a pegasus.
“Ahh-no,” she answered back, “I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be a pegasus.”
She kicked the fallen cone up across the wagon toward the waste bin and picked another off of the stack, scooping to clumps of chocolate ice cream on top of it and passing out the window to first foal in line.
“Your mane's really cool,” the next in told Lightning as the former first put two bits up on the window counter before walking away with his cone. “Does it sweep back like that cause you fly really fast?” The new first-place went on to ask.
“Yeah, you could say that. I used to.” Lightning answered.
“Why are you working in the ice cream wagon?” Yet another foal, a little older than the current front two asked.
“She said used to fly really fast,” the filly standing next to the colt at the window began suggesting, “maybe she went so fast she couldn't control where she was going and flew all the way to the sun! And now she came to the ice cream wagon to cool off?”
“That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!” The little colt next to her said.
“Is not!” She fired back.
“Yeah, it kinda is.” He just reaffirmed himself.
“Stop being mean!” She demanded, resulting in him jabbing his tongue out.
Lightning’s face quickly began to display her unsettledness at the fight that seemed about to start. The idea of potentially having to deal with their parents became unappealing really fast.
“Uhh maybe you guys should just get your ice cream,” Lightning tried suggesting, “You know, that tasty stuff you came here for in the first place?”
The little filly snapped her head over and up to Lightning, and although it took a second or two she developed an expression of apparent guilt. “Sorry.” She actually apologized to Lightning Dust.
“I'm not.” The colt she’d been bickering with declared, yielding a glare from the little filly next to him.
“Come on!” The slightly older colt behind them suddenly complained. “I just wanna get some ice cream already! Can't you two NOT do this all the time?”
“But he's such a jerk!” The little filly yelled, pointing her accusing hoof at her now-apparent brother next to her.
“Who cares?” Words that were once instinctive to Lightning Dust now escaped her mouth again.
“Seriously!” Their older brother agreed with her.
Lightning blinked awkwardly for a second when she saw that both formerly fighting foals were staring at her inquisitively. “Kid,” she actually found the motivation to try and explain, “you can't waste your time going off the cloud about what somepony else thinks or what somepony else is acting like. You're never gonna take yourself anywhere.”
“I never would've ever gotten to do anything if I'd stayed like that,” she added on about herself.
“Whatta you mean?” The little filly asked.
The older brother groaned and then answered his little sister before Lightning could. “She means stop listening to him, AND yelling back at him! Just say whatever you wanted to say or whatever and keep doing whatever you wanted to in the first place. Mom and dad told you guys a million times it takes both of you to make a fight. So if you don't get into it then it'll just be him running his mouth by himself.”
Lightning pointed back at him. “Purple back there's got it.” She said.
“Can get my ice cream first then?” The rear colt pleaded.
The way he begged, and the fact of everything it was a response to made Lightning laugh, just once. All in all it sounded like a single cough, since her mouth was still closed. But regardless, she actually felt amusement again. Keto Profen was right, whatever he had her taking was starting to work.
“Sure,” she answered the older colt.
Lightning took his order and began to scoop it out. As soon as she had passed it out to him and he stepped away, the filly went to come up next but her other brother bumped her casually out of the way.
“Me next!” He demanded.
Lightning just held a flat, unimpressed face. “Yyyeah,” she responded, “how'bout no, kid.” She looked past him at his sister and asked her instead. “So what did you want?”
The little filly went to answer, but she stopped instead for a moment and looked like she was thinking. “Just let him go on get his,” she finally said, “if he wants it that bad.”
Her brother looked absolutely confused, while Lightning almost smiled at the little filly's response. The filly waited for the thirty seconds it took for her brother to get his ice cream and walk off, and then she finally took her turn coming right up to the wagon window.
“So what do you want?” Lightning finally got to ask her again.
“Can you make my ice cream look like your mane?” The little filly asked.
Lightning was nearly stunned by the question, and her face actually displayed a strong reaction for the first time in while, which of all things was shock and confuddledness.
“Uuhhh, what, like, cookie dough and orange sherbet?” She asked back.
“If the colours are the same.” The filly answered, smiling.
Lightning wasn't dumb, she obviously got why the filly had asked for that of all things . . . but the shock value of it was still there. The farthest thing from her for months was the thought of hearing somepony say anything implicatively positive to or about her. First Keto Profen and now this little filly?
“Here you go.” Lightning handed her as much of a perfect blend of the two flavors as she could make.
“Thanks miss.” The little filly said cheerfully, and then took her ice cream cone and turned off to go sit with her family.
Lightning watched her leave, and as she did what she’d told the little filly earlier stuck in her head. It stuck until she realized there was another piece to it that she hadn't mentioned. “Hey kid, wait.” Lightning called out.
The little filly stopped where she was and turned around again.
“You should try to remember what I said a couple minutes ago,” Lightning said, “but . . . you need to also make sure you don't ignore ponies when they're telling you stuff you might not wanna listen to if they're just trying to help you, or if they're trying to keep you from turning into the kind of pony you started ignoring in the first place.”
“That was my mistake,” Lightning admitted, after a pause, “and now I'm not awesome anymore.”
***
Lighting went about closing everything up as the sun was finally being lowered. The vending window was closed, all the ice cream bins were sealed, plastic cover was over the cone stacks and lids were back on the sprinkle buckets. She'd even wiped the counter clean of its spilled ice cream droplets. All she had left to do from what she remembered Fudge Pop telling her was to wash off the scoops.
As she went to collect them she stopped. What she'd told Keto Profen was true: she never used to eat ice cream, at least not any time in her recent past, not since she made her entire life about training, intensity, and pushing her physical limits. She'd touched nothing that would have compromised her extraordinary flying shape . . . former extraordinary flying shape. The only time she'd even recently had ice cream was when Keto got her some yesterday.
The contemplation grew in the front of her mind, not having any restraint anymore. And she thought, “Why not? What am I holding myself up to now anyways?”
With that, she grabbed a scoop in-hoof and dug it into the orange sherbet. She peeled out a good-sized clump and lifted the ice cream scooper up above her muzzle and just let the whole scoop of ice cream just fall straight into her mouth and gulped the creamy orange deliciousness straight down.
For some reason the memory of Keto of getting her some the day before held on as she consumed her scoop in a single moment, but that then quickly turned into the memory that it was around the time right then that she normally had been taking her medication. She needed to take it with food, Keto said so, and she hadn't exactly tested it otherwise. And, the orange sherbet bin was still open . . .
Lightning dug out another scoop, pulled out the two pill bottles from her pony pocket and took them out. One big capsule and one medium, like she'd been doing every day, just like Keto told her to. She packed them into the scoop she'd taken and went right on with what she'd done with the first, waiting until the orange taste was completely gone afterwards to toss the final ice cream scooper into the tiny sink and seal the orange sherbet container again.
By the time she finally left . . . everything felt like it was sinking. Everything she thought with each step she took sank down into her just like the ice cream had, and even though it all stopped where her heart was in her chest, it felt like it went so much deeper.
It was what she'd said to that little filly, both parts of it, both parts she'd said about herself: the embittered memories of her parents that came from what she said first . . . but those came up on their own often enough, especially now. So what was it really then?
Lightning Dust knew. She finally realized the truth, she finally saw beyond her own self-victimization, and just what it was she realized made her stop where she was.
For a moment she just stood there at that grassy Canterlot street corner, eyes angled downward. It was the truth that she'd told that little filly before she left with her cone . . . that stupid Rainbow Dash . . . was right. Lightning Dust had been wrong, just like she warned that little filly not to do, she'd stopped listening to anypony . . . stopped caring about anypony, in a way . . .
Lightning went home with stinging eyes and nose, the pre-crying sensation gripping her every step of the way until she finally got to her little two-room apartment . . . and then the sensation lifted away, replacing itself with the feeling her face fur slowly growing damp from her eyes down.
Author's Note
Here it FINALLY is!
I'm really sorry, everypony, for being away so long. But, I'm back now . . . again.
We have Lightning Dust being faced with some realities and painful memories, some of which took part in making into who she formerly was. And, she comes to realize a bitter truth here . . . but with accepting such things, moving onward and bettering of one's life afterwards is always meant to follow.
Comments are welcome, and loved, as always.
Taking a new kind of Risk
Lightning's eyes opened themselves after another horrible night. She'd tried to sleep, like anypony would, but it wasn't going to happen, at least not like it should. She'd awoken six times over the course of the night, probably without ever sleeping for more than an hour straight. The end result now: her eyes were burning, and her head felt . . . well, tight. It wasn't a headache, but it felt like it was leaning over that edge waiting for its chance to become one.
She should have just taken that other stuff that Keto Profen had given her. Those blue Esco-Ezo-something pills. There was an S and a Z in there somewhere, but whatever, they made her sleep the couple times she either remembered or willed herself to take one. And right then, even after laying in bed for over ten hours . . . sleep still sounded really nice.
“Mmhmg-ghnm . . .” She tried, but her eyes wouldn't stay closed anymore. She had to get up. She had to do something.
The thought only then struck her: working at the ice cream wagon like she'd agreed to would probably be the best idea. So, she slowly rolled over onto her other side. The tiny bedside clock she came to stare at said that it was a few minutes past nine. That was one thing that had really changed, or rather more ceased to exist: routine. Lightning's dream and end goal was gone, so the future was just . . . blank, and empty. Nothing to work toward anymore. It used to be bed by midnight, up by seven everyday. Fly, train, pull stunts, occasionally do her actual job. Like the hard angles of the lightning and sudden expulsion of dust in her cutie mark implied, she was talented, amazing, flawless at making abrupt sharp turns at high speed and halting herself, voiding all moment out of her body almost instantaneously. For that, her actual job had been to course through Cloudsdale perusing for, and clearing out any stray clouds that drifted into the city unwanted.
There wasn't going to be any more of that though; her stepping hoof in Cloudsdale again was about as likely as her going to Ponyville.
Nope, it was all gone.
But when she let herself slip out of bed, the floor struck more recent thoughts into her. A lot of stuff was gone, but there was new stuff too. She didn't think she was all that bad at handing out ice cream. Kids really seemed to like her. Actually they all seemed to think she was awesome, just looked awesome, or something along those lines. As her old self, her old self being her from three whole months ago, she honestly would have told them that she was, in fact. She'd stopped always telling them that she wasn't like she had her first day serving ice cream. In fact, all yesterday she'd tell them with a weak smile that she used to be. To them, apparently, she just gave off an air of awesomeness.
After the first few times a couple days ago she started to not really mind. It did boost her ego, if only enough just to make her able to smile those few times. But . . . it's not like she would vending ice cream forever. Fudge Pop would be back tomorrow, and that was going to be the end of it. She couldn't undo rejection from the Wonderbolts, and she couldn't undo that either. No sense in trying to push limits that couldn't be, at least now she didn't see any.
So, she turned about away from her clock, finally. The door was open and waiting right at the corner of the room, and she took a couple of full breaths as she walked up to and through it. She passed her bathroom by, the only other room on the short hallway apart from the bedroom at its end that she'd just come out of. Its opposite end rounded a right turn and led for only about a pony-length until it came to the narrow staircase, taking another right turn itself. The stairs led from one low-ceiling floor down to another, to the only other room in her unit. It was both a living room area and a kitchen, though its kitchen corner literally was a single-burner stove with a small oven underneath, a few cupboards around it and a tiny sink as well. That was the extent of it; that was thirty bits a month.
Lightning walked over to the cupboards at her newfound sluggish morning pace. She opened one to reveal the last box of the many high-nutrition cereals she used to always keep herself stocked and ready with. It was probably almost empty too; it's not like she'd been paying attention as she poured it out each morning.
She gave a quick shake before actually grabbing a bowl.
Yup, it was practically done. In fact there ended up being exactly enough left for her one single breakfast bowl, minus the crushed up dust that was always at the bottom of the box. She eyed the dust in the box for a moment, lifting her eyebrows for a portion of it.
In the end though, she laid the box back down the counter and made herself eat.
She took notice as she ate though, that she was actually eating at what one would probably consider a normal pace.
Had she been doing that for any of the past few days? She wondered about it, only remembering each of her meals for the past three months being bitter, agonizing self-force-feeding. Was this . . . her getting a little more better? How long had it been since she went to Keto Profen the first time. Three weeks, maybe three and a half? Three and a half weeks since she started taking the medication he'd boosted up for her. He'd said it would take a while . . . and just now she realized she actually had been easing a small bit out of her depression, slowly. Really slowly, but still . . .
Why did she view it in the pretext of specifically being the first time she went to Keto? Well, who else had she actually even spoken to at all besides him until these past few days? No pony, it was just him. And, most of those times it was him who wanted to talk to her, or she thought so, then she was actually able to remember how she'd felt back then, as long ago as a mere count of weeks seemed to feel. It had been an ingrained reality to her that no pony cared and no pony was going to, until Keto made himself an exception.
She wondered about the next time she would see him as she ran some water over the inside of the bowl and then left it to dry before grabbing the key to the ice cream wagon.
***
Lightning Dust watched with genuine amusement as a young unicorn colt fiddled so furiously with his mane in front of the vending window. He pressed down and backward firmly with his hooves for what could've been the hundreth time before he finally managed to work his hair into parting around his horn and then rejoining right behind it. From there he swept it back into as much of a stream line as he could get, and then very cautiously let it go.
“There! See!” he exclaimed, “Now it looks like yours!”
He turned himself to directly face the vending window again, but the moment he moved the entirety of his mane shot back forward into a hanging set of bangs once again.
“Aaahh, come on!” He yelled out.
His yell drew a swift response from his mother nearby. “Neat Keeping, watch your volume! You're in public, and that poor mare is only a foreleg away, you don't need to deafen her.”
“Yes, mom.” He made about as much effort to withhold aggravation and annoyance from his voice as any foal would.
“Sorry.” He then said to Lightning Dust.
“Please kid,” she said right back, “when you've had super-sonic wind roaring past your ears you get a kinda different standard of loud than everypony else.”
The little unicorn looked up to her with apparent confusion. “Super-sonic?”
“Faster than sound.” She explained.
“How fast is sound?” He instantly asked.
Lightning responded with a quick shrug. “How fast do you hear something after somepony says it?”
He looked like he thought for a couple seconds before his eyes went huge. “Whoah . . .”
Lightning smiled, genuinely, while she finished the little unicorn's elaborate ice cream order. The shock of it only came in as the colt left with his treat, leaving three bits on the vending counter.
She’d just acted like her old self . . . no, she talked like her old self . . . like herself. She actually, however weakly, boasted. But, she hadn't intended to, not for the sake of it at least. Her intention in that moment had just been to lift up the little colt's spirits. And doing that . . . made her happy.
Everything was changing . . . she was standing back up.
“Hey.” A new voice greeted.
Lightning's head swung back to the window. It was Keto Profen, white pharmacy lab coat and all.
“You're here?” She couldn’t help but ask.
“Wh-yeah,” he responded and went on to somewhat explain, “eh-every now and then we all get something special for our lunch break at the Pharmacy. One of us takes a pool of bits from everypony and runs out to grab whatever we want. So-so this time I said we should all get ice cream.”
“Yeah, I can see it.” Lightning said after contemplating the idea of them having nothing but whatever they brought with them in the morning for days on end.
Though, she suddenly gave him an odd look. “Why ice cream?”
Keto’s hesitation before answering was noticeable, although far from lengthy. “Uh, well it's summer. An-and I knew you were p-probably still going to be the one here today, since Fudge Pop said three days, she'd be gone for three days.”
“You came cause I was still here?” She asked, initially surprised.
“Ah . . .” he started to answer, “i-it's—you told me you didn't really know anypony anymore, or just, I guess don't want to talk to some. But you've at least talked to me since you started your treatment, so I mean even though I'm pretty lame I still thought s-seeing somepony you kind of know might be nice, r-or help you . . . a tiny little bit, maybe.”
“Uh, but, so you did really come here just cause I was? To see if I was any happier?” She still questioned, now surprised that he’d done so on her part, for her sake.
“Well, yg-yeah,” he started, yet more nervousness working into his voice, “I probably didn't exactly make that sound ri-right in any way, but-“
“Nah,” she tried to dismiss the notion for him, “I don't . . . or, didn't always care how anypony says stuff. I still don't, but I don't know if that's just not something that's changed or I'm just not better enough yet to. “It kinda just was a little too much of a surprise, the stuff you said.” Her eyes drifted off as she spoke up again. “Nopony ever really wanted to hang out with me before . . . everything. Who could guess why?” She ended with a mellow sarcasm.
Keto looked surprised at that revelation, though his own anxiety refrained his expression. “You're an amazing flyer right? I thi-think you said it was Cloudsdale you were the best in. Some ponies had to have thought you were cool? Even if ponies can get socially intimidated by ponies they hold high up some of them will still try to get close to them anyways.”
“Yeah,” she answered, as her eyes then fell downward and her depressed tone began to creep back into her voice, “for a little while it kinda felt like that, but . . . my attitude just kinda took over everything.”
“You-you don't have an attitude,” he tried to counter her, “or—not anymore. I mean, I didn't know you before, but I do now. I-I like knowing the you now.”
That did at least provoke the desire in her to smile. And she did, weakly. “Yeah,” she said, “kinda got that.”
Keto's own nervous smile slipped into to a straight line and his eyes shifted just a bit off contact from hers.
“Thanks for setting me up here. Kinda, I mean,” she said, with an initial look of confusion resulting from him, “With the ice cream wagon.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said once he understood, “it wa-w-was just an idea. It's not like I actually really thought a b-bunch of-of stuff out or anything. That was more of just a blind chance with asking her if she'd let you.”
“Yeah,” Lightning led, “but you still did it, didn't you?”
“W-what . . . ah-what was I supposed to do? I thought it might help you; I want you to feel better. Why wouldn't I?” He asked back.
“Thanks . . .” she said, really considering it for a moment, “Uh, and I actually have been feeling better, for the past few days. For whatever reason or whatever all of them, the colts and fillies, they love coming up to me. They all think I'm . . . cool and awesome.”
“Ah-yeah, kids are usually decent at pointing out the obvious.” Keto said plainly, trying his best to convey that he viewed what they were telling her as a fact.
Lightning actually took that in for a moment, but the compelling of her depression still told her to deny it. “Uh, sure. They've never even seen me leave this wagon let alone fly, even if some of them did ask about what I used to do. And I'm not the only pony in all of Equestria with a swept-back streak mane.”
“Yeah,” he still kept up, “but you . . . are, awesome. I-I mean . . . I won't make anything sound right, but you just . . . kind of can tell that you're awesome, even just from the start.”
“Um . . . thanks . . . I haven't had anypony say that kind of stuff about me in a while, anypony older than eight.” She said.
They both laughed just a little at the last part of what she'd said, and at the end of it she leaned onto the counter lazily, propping her head with one hoof.
“Lyra used to say stuff like that too,” she told him, breaking eye contact upon recallin memories, “only it was a little bit different. Or, it was kinda the same, but she's my sister, and you're . . .” Lightning's speech dropped off when the realization struck that she didn't exactly know what she was about to say. Keto even felt the same awkwardness, wondering where she had been going, only with his severe anxiety it was significantly amplified.
“She lives pretty close, right?” He asked, trying to keep her going solely in her sister's direction. “Di-d-didn't you say the other day you really want to go see her again?”
“Yeah,” Lightning’s voice carried all her mixed sentiments at the moment, “Ponyville . . . I'm not about to go there.”
Keto did hesitate to ask, but, that strong of a sentiment left too much of desire to know. “Ah-t, why not?”
Lightning responded with a deep expression of annoyance, and bitter, narrowed eyes. She slumped herself down onto the vending counter, no longer propping up her head but instead now resting in on top of her front forelegs.
“. . . sorry . . .” Keto retracted himself.
“It's fine.” She said, after a moment, her head still facing him but her eyes looking away to the side. “It's cause SHE lives there too.”
“. . . Um . . ?” Keto found he had to keep faintly encouraging her to continue.
“Rainbow Dash—“ Her mentioning of the name, and the particularly resentful way with which she said sparked up Keto's the memory from three days prior, when she'd exploded at him for just saying the word "rainbow" itself. “—She got me kicked out.” Lightning finished with the one-line explanation. It left Keto’s eyes widening, and didn’t exactly leave him feeling like he could say anything. But she still said more just a few seconds after that, “. . . it was my fault . . .”
Those words threw Keto into mental shock. That had defied everything that Lightning had been saying since he'd met her. It went completely inverse to what he thought was her affirmed mentality. Which meant . . . she had to be changing inside, maybe even finally beginning to lift out of the lowest point of her depression for good . . . if she'd left the stage of self-pitying that most went through . . .
“But,” Lightning went on still, “she's the one who called me out on everything . . . and told them what I was really like.”
That, allowed Keto Profen to finally piece together a more detailed, but still blurry outline of what must have happened to her.
“I'm not taking the chance of running into her .” Lightning declared firmly.
Keto waited a minute, to see if she was still going to go any further. When it decisively seemed that Lightning had no more to say after affirming her own refusal to travel to Ponyville, the only thing Keto felt he could and should do was identify with her. “Well, that—the awkwardness I think you're probably talking about, I'm-I’m pretty well familiar with that.” He said.
Lightning lifted her eyes back up to look him in the face again, although she still didn't pick her head up off the counter, but it was enough to give away the faintest curiosity.
“Severe anxiety,” Keto explained, “Really, really . . . bad anxiety. It’s-ss even the reason I stutter.”
He reached into his pony pocket with a wing and pulled out a thin, transparent pharmacy-orange prescription bottle and showed it to her for a second.
Lorazepam
For some reason, the realization that Keto also had some problem so severe that he constantly needed medication made Lightning pick up her head again. Actually, it also made her reflect in that moment about what she'd initially thought of him, not that the state of her depression at the time she’d first met him a month ago had granted the thought any more than a second. Shy, quiet, seemingly inactive; not just Keto, obviously, anypony like that, she'd always just cast them off as weird . . . and weak. And now here she was feeling guilty.
“I just thought you were one of those ponies.” She even admitted to him, though her admitting guilt in herself required her breaking eye contact for the moment she said so.
“I—no I can probably guess what that means,” he took onto what she meant pretty quickly, “But, ah-anyways, don’t you really want to see your sister again though?”
Her response was heated, although she didn’t actually raise her volume by all that much. “Of course I do! I just don't wanna have to have anything to do with HER , the other her.”
A concept came to mind for Keto, but . . . he wasn't sure . . . he really wasn’t sure. It was how it would sound that he was afraid of, and to some extent he was suspicious of himself for coming up with it, but . . . he genuinely wanted her to get to see her sister again, since he thought of all things that could only help her.
“Ah-we could both go-or I mean I can come too,” he started up, praying incessantly inside that it wouldn’t come across the way could, and the way it was probably going to, “You just don't want to run into the other her, whi-which I guess you mean you don't want to have to interact with her. Ponies are—are a lot less likely to go up to somepony they don't like if the pony they don't like isn't alone. There’s real psychology behind it—“
“Wait what?” she abruptly cut in, “So you, wanna go with me down to Ponyville, and what?”
And there it was, as far as Keto could guess. He felt his temperature start to climb, even as he tried to explain what he really meant. “Uh-I'd just basically be there as like, a wall. It's-it’s like I just said, about her probably not bothering you if both of us are together when you’re, you know, w-walking around. You can get to visit your sister finally, and I'll just . . . uh, there's a bakery down there that's basically the best in Equestria. I'm always running over my mirconutrient and vitamin intake when I eat, so I could probably just go stuff my face for a while and take a break . . . from myself.”
“Um . . . so—“ Lightning was about to start with a conspicuous look on her face, but they were both interrupted suddenly by a mother standing with her little filly behind Keto Profen.
“Excuse me,” the mother asked, clearly irritated, but still actually coming off as polite, “but could you two please wait to flirt with each other until there's not a line waiting patiently?”
Both of them were taken by complete surprise, and when Keto turned around, and Lightning actually looked past him, they both found a line of probably ten ponies waiting with all of their eyes on the two of them. For Keto in particular, the flirting comment and the amount of stares spiked his blood pressure fast, and as blood pooled into the vessels just beneath his skin to compensate, he heated just as quick, way more so than he already had from talking to Lightning Dust.
“Yyyeah,” Lightning said to him quickly, “ah, I'm gonna have to take care of this.”
“I'm sorry,” he said just as quick, stepping out of the way as he did so, “n-nn-nevermind what I said—r wherever I was going.”
“Huh? No, just—“ she stopped him, in a slight amount of surprise at his simple abandonment of everything he’d been saying. She paused for a half-second, checking the line again. “—come back after.”
***
Lightning Dust locked the wagon door at day's end. It was the third time, and the last time. As of tomorrow, she had nothing to do again. Nothing . . .
She'd been surprised, or perhaps confused, she couldn't exactly identify it, when Keto Profen didn't walk back up after the line had cleared. But then, she'd remembered that he had a job to get back to, though that led to her also remembering he'd come there for ice cream for himself and his coworkers and hadn't left with any. Which, somehow still going, led into wondering if showing back up without anything might have put off his coworkers a bit, which she only really thought about because her mind had held onto what he'd told her earlier about himself having severe anxiety.
Her thoughts ended though, when she saw that he was actually waiting nearby. He looked like he might have been waiting for a little bit; he wasn't exactly pacing, more like taking a couple steps every so often but nothing repetitive. He ceased once he saw her, obviously, and slowly came up.
“Hey.” She said as she stepped down from the wagon door.
“H-sorry for causing you problems, earlier.” He just regretfully apologized.
“Yeah that's fine,” she said, and even found she had the energy and motivation to wave a hoof when she tried to convince him to just forget, “It was just handing out cones to a lot more ponies than a usual line. Uh . . . dude, don't worry.” She felt like she had to say at the end, once she actually took notice of just how distressed the thought that he’d caused her trouble apparently made him.
As simple as her not-worrying statement was, it was enough for him. Well, emotionally, not in terms of his actual anxiety over the matter subsiding. “You told me to come back?” He asked, or rather reminded her, with his face lightening up.
“Yeah . . .” she started to say back, and went into alluding to her own thoughts, “after the line was gone, I did think for the rest of the afternoon. I really do wanna see Lyra again. And, I was going to ask,” she paused for a second, just to change her expression over to a light, but thankful smile, “You said you'd go down with me? You've been trying help me get better since I first came into your pharmacy. But, the whole going to Ponyville, and back: that's an awful lot of time . . . with another pony. The trip down, walking around the place, the trip back,” she took one more pause, but this time it was to look away from him . . . and to add just the faintest smirk to her own face, “probably eating somewhere afterwards.”
Keto's blood froze . . . and it didn't, but it felt like it, and it stalled any response he possibly could have made.
“You're asking me out.” Lightning Dust rather blatantly declared to him.
Full-reverse, Keto's heart shot as much blood just beneath his skin as it possibly could, but the uncontrollable amount of epinephrine blasting into his system kept him from perceiving any physical feeling. All it allowed him to comprehend was the blinding progression from one thought to the next, one kind of thought to the next, one emotion to the next though whilst still existing under a blanket of fear.
What had he done? She thought he liked her? Of course he did! He couldn't lie to himself about something so obvious! But he shouldn't have made it so obvious. He shouldn't have even have let any of it show. She was depressed! He was supposed to be helping her, not leading her into something that could only end badly! But that slight smirk on her face suggested she liked the idea. Maybe it wouldn't end badly? What? Her, with him? Any mare with him! Of course it would end badly, if it even started! He could barely talk to ponies as it is, let alone try to avoid stuttering. And he could only manage that because he was medicated on the job! Forget mares, it was a miracle they even let him out of Pharmacy School. He could he have been so obvious to give this much away to her? How could he even come to the point of allowing thoughts about what was meant to be forever beyond his reach stick around in his mind? He should've just gone somewhere else for the staff's lunch. He should've just waited and let her come in for her refill when her prescription ran out. But . . . but . . .
“I've had stallions interested in me before, you know, with how awesome you said I was. Course I blew em all off though, cause I didn't care,” she shrugged at the end just before she resumed looking at him again, “But . . .”
Keto just breathed. He tried so hard to force through as close to normal breaths as he could get. And it didn't go unnoticed, though it wasn’t as if his lack of saying anything would have either.
Lightning saw Keto's chest tensing numerous times in the middle of each inhale and exhale he made and took. She could also plainly see his fur damp with sweat, but she'd kind of expected that much. The thing with his breathing though . . . and his face looked like somepony struggling to hold themselves together. He shouldn't have been that terrified . . .
“Uh, hey, dude,” she asked, “are you alright?”
It was only after she spoke that her memory struck her about his anxiety. Severe, he'd included that word.
He was so stupid for being afraid of stuff!
That mode of thinking had been so intrinsic, so natural to her for so long that that was the first line of thought to cross through her head. She didn't think it consciously, at least not really. She didn't literally think that of him right there and then . . . but she realized that she would have, only a few months ago. That, and the fact that she didn't even initially remember his anxiety problem brought the realization of just how little she really did use to care about anypony else. It brought it more to light for her now than ever.
“Agh, I'm sorry. Uh, I shouldn't have gone like that—“ She started, not honestly sure how to go about a real apology, not exactly having made many previously. However, for what might have been the first time, Keto Profen actually cut her off.
“No . . . it's-it's-it's fine. I'm fine. I'm . . . not,” he started going, and then realized the pointlessness of lying right then and there at that point.
He shook his head, although it honestly looked more like a shiver, or a brief, violent tremor. “I really shouln't even have been doing all this,” he began again, “But . . . I really did want to help you. Any time I did something, I wanted to help you . . . but yeah, you're right—not that I'm, or was asking you out, but I like you, definitely enough I probably would ask you out if I was a normal pony,” he paused for couple of seconds in his admission, coming to a completely different realization, “Hah, I'm not stuttering . . . I guess I can only say straight words when I'm this terrified. That’s probably what I like about you the most; you can tell even through the depression, you’re not afraid of anything.” He stopped, after referring to her overall, underlying nature.
Lightning didn’t know whether Keto was only pausing, or if he was actually done, so she just took her own chance while the silence lasted.
His attention directly returned to her.
And then she went ahead with it. “Ya'know, if that was you asking to go out with me, I'd say yes.”
Author's Note
Whoah, it's almost like I'm having some kind of confession-of-feelings week or something. First the latest chapter of Hurricane Paradigm and now this?
Firstly, the concept of Lyra being Lightning Dust's sister I originally got from this guy . Albeit, my backstory of LD and Lyra and their growing up is obviously different from his, but I promised I would credit him with the inspiration for the idea.
You should already know from chapter one, Keto Profen's name is literally a bi-worded version of Ketoprofen, which is a strong prescription anti-inflammatory medication.
So, now you needlessly know a bit of information about me, so here I'll stop.
Please enjoy reading everypony :)
Somepony Thought About Her
Lightning meandered out of the front door of her small apartment complex, the smallest, and therefore cheapest Canterlot had to offer.
She didn't have any other choice in apartments, as she didn't exactly have all that much remaining in terms of bits. And, in her eyes, she didn't have much else of a choice in terms of where she lived; she could never return to Cloudsdale. No, there was simply no way she could ever show her face there again, because anypony who used to know her before she went to the Wonderbolt Academy: she'd have to tell them. And it wasn't exactly like Ponyville was any option either; that's where Rainbow Dash lived . . .
The sun was just climbing high enough to rise over the tops of the two and three story stone buildings of the narrow street her temporary home was on. She spread out her wings, somewhat, to take in as much of the sunlight's warmth as she reasonably could and kept moving on.
She had to do something; she knew Keto Profen was right about that much. It was the days when she just sat or walked around aimlessly that her depression was the worst, obviously, as she realized now thanks to him, because during such times there wasn't anything else for her to think aobut. So . . . she had to find something to do, and maybe she would eventually start wondering about what she really wanted to do with her life as a whole now, now that the only option that she'd ever let herself see for as long as she'd been able to even think about the future at all had now been torn away from her.
“Come on, sis, let's go to the ledge!” a little colt yelled back to his sister as he came barreling past Lightning Dust.
The little filly and colt siblings ran past her as they headed west through the Canterlot city streets towards the famous ledges of the city that was built on a mountain.
“Sorry miss!” he called out an apology to Lightning after they almost ran into her.
Watching the two of them running off towards the ever-magnificent view one could have by looking out at the world around from the ledges of Canterlot, Lightning decided she might as well head out that way too. Perhaps the view would pull her mind loose for a while.
***
The portion of the city ledge Lightning followed them out to was set up like a little open park area, with grass spread wide for a short distance split only by a few white stone paths leading up to the railed ledge itself. There was also a small wooden wagon stationed at the area's outskirk, with a sign hung from that read: Ice Cream!
The area wasn’t completely deserted, but much to Lightning's content the little ledge-park wasn't too crowded either. There were at most only ten ponies, including the ice cream vendor inside her wagon. The two foals were peering over the ledge, looking out at the world beyond, and an assortment of other ponies were seated at the various picnic tables that stood throughout the grass.
Lightning walked up to ledge herself, looking out over the land below and beyond.
Had she found herself standing there before the Academy, she knew she would have felt that irresistible dare-devil urge to throw herself over the edge and see what aerial stunts she could make out of the plummet. Now though, she just took in the view. She felt better than she had, now at a point of only feeling general depression and not teetering back and forth between complete and utter misery and apathy like she had been. She knew it was because of Keto's medicine . . . because of Keto. Inside she really was grateful for him trying to help her so much, and it had been a while, now that she thought about it, since she'd really let herself feel grateful to anypony else.
“H-hey, Lightning Dust,” Keto Profen greeted her a bit shyly, walking up.
She looked over to see him walking up to her from nearby. “You're out here?” she asked, sounding just as surprised as she looked.
“Uh, well I do, kind of, exist outside of the pharmacy,” he joked back in response.
Lightning actually smiled just a bit at that, granted her grin was clearly sarcastic, it showed him that she found what he'd said humorous all the same.
“Yeah, nopony ever would've guessed,” she replied with sarcasm.
“Well if you're laughing at things now . . .” he began to say about her grin and humor, “especially at me, you've gotta be feeling a little better?”
“Yeah, some,” she said back, “I feel better than I did last time, now that I've been getting sleep.”
“Yeah, Eszopiclone always works,” he said, to which she looked at him with a raised eyebrow for a second.
“It tastes horrible,” she commented, making it obvious she knew the word he’d used was the name of the sleep medication. “You let it touch your tongue?” he asked almost right away, surprised. “Hey,” she answered, mildly defensive, “I'm not a unicorn. I can't just use stupid brain-magic to make the thing stay perfectly in the middle of the water I'm holding in my mouth.”
“Uh-sorry,” he said back.
She side-glances him again upon him making yet another apology, at which he realizes he'd done such and he just begins getting hot under his fur. “It's fine . . .” she told him, “whatever, don't worry about it. Yeah it left me wanting to scrape off my tongue that one time, but it works pretty good. It's just like you said it would.”
She looked to him with actual appreciation and acknowledgment in her eyes when she said what she did, which Keto finds, to his surprise as nothing but time and Lorazepam had ever really done so before, her appreciative gaze actually calms him down and lets his skin under his fur cool back down to normal.
“Yeah, of course. I wouldn't lie to you, to anypony, or . . . I mean I promised you that I was trying to help you. And I still am, just . . . not exactly doing anything right now,” said after a few seconds.
“N-no, you are, kinda . . .” she said, looking away while she did and trailing her words off. Keto took the words in with widened eyes and a partly-open mouth, not at all certain of anything he should say back.
After a moment he broke the growing awkward silence, though not with any comment directly related to what Lightning he just said to him.
“Do you want some ice cream?” he asked.
Lightning looked over at the ice cream stand. The last time she'd had ice cream was almost two years ago, the last time she spent any real time with her sister. She looked back to herself, running her eyes in a scan over her own figure. It had been weeks since she got expelled from the academy, and she'd basically ceased any attempt at all to maintain her physical fitness. Her form and shape were still relatively unchanged, but the drop in muscle tone was beginning to become noticeable.
In the end she decided to just go with it. Besides, it wasn't like she had any real need or desire to hold her top physical condition anymore . . . and eating ice cream would allow memories of all the times she used to have with her sister: good memories . . . happy memories.
“Sure, I guess; just one scoop of chocolate,” she agreed to it.
“Okay. Um, did you want it with rainbow sprinkles, or choc—” he only got two and half words past rainbow before she exploded with harsh bitterness. “I don't want RAINBOW anything!” she shouted.
Keto pulled back, and all the brightness fled from his face in an instant, replaced by uncertainty. Lightning snapped her head away to the side and stared off with spite in her eyes.
Out of the side of her sight she did notice his reaction, and a another moment of guilt actually began to come over her. It had been such a long time since she'd really felt guilty over anything, the later part of her growing up had pushed her into replacing it with resentment . . . with blaming the other side of whatever her conflict was, always, no matter what. But that's not what this was. Having her one goal and dream shattered really had left her this open again.
She was hesitant as she spoke again, unused to the sensation of guilt. “. . . Sorry,” she said quietly.
“I-it's fine,” he responded quickly, “I didn't know: whatever it is.”
“Don't worry about it; it's fine. Just, don't . . . bring that up again,” she told him.
Keto just assumed she was very broadly referring to the word rainbow itself, and he chose to just go with it for then. “Ok,” he said. She actually released some of the stress from her face, even closing her eyes and exhaling through a slow, bowing breath with her head half-way tucked down.
“Here,” he offered her, “ah-did you wanna sit down while I go up?” He pointed with a hoof to indicate the nearest empty picnic table. Lightning reached back to her pony pocket and felt for any bits she had. “Ahh,” she began to say as she discovered what she’d assumed, she had nothing, “I might have to fly back to my place real quickly. I don't think I brought any bits out with me.”
“Here,” he said back, shaking his head with an assuring, though still clearly nervous smile, “you have enough bothering you. Don't worry about bits; I'll get it.”
“. . . thanks . . .” She said quietly, looking after him for a moment as he walked away, then pulling her eyes off the receding stallion and heading slowly over to the table.
Keto walked up to the open service window of the small ice cream vendor just as a group of two fillies and two colts receive their soft-serve cones and delightfully walk away with them. The server at the window, a blue unicorn mare with a curly white mane puts their bits into her jar and looks back out just in time to smile at Keto Profen as he approaches.
“Hi, uh-two single-scoops please: one vanilla, one chocolate,” he asked as he greeted her.
“Would you like any sprinkles on either, young sir?” the vendor mare asked.
“Ah-no thank you; not for mine. And for hers . . .” he answered, but then stopped for a short moment to look back over at Lightning Dust and think. “Um,” he asked the vendor, turning his head back to her, “are your colored sprinkles all just in one bin, or . . .” The mare nodded her head before he’d even finished and looked over to her immediate side to indicate so Keto could see for himself. “Sorry, nevermind then,” he apologized.
“What? Why, what you going to ask for?” she asked, slightly puzzled.
“I was just wondering if we're allowed to ask for just sprinkles of two different colors?” he went ahead and said, since she’d asked.
The mare looked a tiny bit befuddled, but she answered him, “well, I don't get asked that often, but actually I can do that easy, not a problem.”
Keto lightened up instantly when she said that it was fine. Though she added right then, “It's just there's not going be that many to go on the ice cream since I can only take out the ones right on top that I can see.” She lit her horn and levitated up a few blue sprinkles to demonstrate, all coming from the top of the half-filled bin.
“Oh that's fine,” he promised, “it's just a little bit less dextrose anyways. I mean, she's a former athlete, so she's probably not gonna mind a little bit less sugar.”
The server began to smile at Keto's mentioning of Lightning. “Are these for the vanilla or the chocolate scoop?” she asked. “The chocolate,” he answered, after which she set the vanilla scoop’s cone down and got ready to sprinkle the chocolate. “And what two colors did you want then?” she asked. “Uh orange and blue, if that's alright,” he answered again.
“The same colors as a certain special somepony?” she inquired with a hinting smile.
For the first second after she spoke, Keto was actually too shocked to react properly, or how he normally would. After that one second passed however, and he realized that she had clearly indicated Lightning Dust with a motion of her head, his face shot beat-red, though as always it wasn't noticeable under his red fur. And then he struggled to pull together a verbal reaction amidst his intense anxiety, “wait-wh-no, woah-uh she's not, she's . . . a friend, who's really down on herself right now. And, I can't really do much for her, so this is just my best attempt to cheer her up.”
“Oh?” she reacted, with a quick but still seemingly genuine shift of demeanor to sympathy, “I'm sorry to hear she's had to fall into one of those times. Whatever's happened to her?”
“She . . . kind of lost an opportunity,” Keto explained indirectly, carefully trying to avoid saying anything directly personal that he knew about her.
“Was it something big?” she asked, keeping most of her focus on him while levitating up most of the visible blue sprinkles, specifically targeting lighter blue ones closer to the same shade as Lightning Dust's coat.
“Uh, yeah, she . . .” Keto paused for a second to think on how to say what had happened without really saying it, “can't do what she always wanted to do anymore.”
The vendor mare gasped. “Oh no . . . I know-or I guess I used to know somepony who had something like that happen to them . . . it was so bad . . .” she said, starting to trail off but snapping herself back after a moment.
“Uh-I'm so sorry for spacing into my own memories like that,” the mare apologized, and went asking, “she's not terribly out of sorts is she? Oh tell me she didn't lose her ability to fly?”
“Wha-no, no n-nothing like that. She can still fly . . .” Keto answered, and then thought for a brief moment again before finishing what he was saying, “. . . well, she can, just not like she used to.”
“At least she still can then,” she responded with obvious relief, “just, I guess given she's a pegasus that's the first thing my mind jumped to.”
She kept on levitating sprinkles, switching to sorting out all the orange ones she can find and lowering them down onto Lightning's chocolate ice cream. They were a little less visible against the dark surface than the blue, so she was careful to make sure and put them in slightly denser concentrations than just a random sprinkle here or there.
“Well, yeah, that's kind of the first thing anypony would assume. It's alright,” he assured her.
“At least she can still get to go about something of her life. My sister . . .” the vendor mare began to wander off in her memories again, and then suddenly displayed a bit of momentary shock at her revelation to him, not having really intended on saying that friend she'd referred to was her sister. “She's . . . n-not herself anymore,” she explained vaguely, sounding like she didn’t really want to.
Keto’s mouth opened just slightly, but then he hesitated still, for a half moment. “Is . . . it a mental condition?” he tentatively asked.
All the vendor did was nod her head, though she then also shook it a few times. “. . . I don't understand it,” she said, “but, she can never really leave the hospital, not now.”
Keto felt a cold drop in his gut, freezing up in his not knowing just how to respond to her. He'd never had to deal with any patients or anypony related to a patient with something as severely life-altering as what she was implying her sister lived with.
“But she's ok, i-in a sense,” the vendor suddenly started telling him, “she lives at Ponyville Hospital; there's a wonderl, nice doctor there who takes such sweet care of her.”
Keto blinked once at the last part of what she said, just a bit curious. “Dr Stable?” he asked out of curiosity.
She nodded, and with a small smile again. “How'd you know his name?” she asked.
“I'm a pharmacist here Canterlot,” he explained, “Ponyville's well supplied in most things but sometimes we get telegrams from him requesting certain medications and medical supplies that they only keep a certain amount of on hoof down there.” “And you're right, he's an awesome doctor,” he added on the assurance of his own belief.
“Oh thanks,” she said, all but exhaling relief and gratitude, “I'm really glad to hear that from somepony who must know. I just . . . really miss her.”
She shook her head once again to snap herself back to the present in front of her and levitated the two ice cream cones out the service window to Keto Profen, who took one with each wing.
“Well, are you allowed to visit?” he asked, and then also starting explaining just a little, “cause, I mean it would be good for her, probably. I'm not a Psychologist, and pretty everything I know about the brain is all chemical, but I know from what Doctor Stable's told me that it usually helps.”
“Yeah, I wanted to soon,” she in turn explained to him, “I probably will, even though I don't have anypony who could run the ice-cream wagon for the day or two I'd be gone.”
Keto shared her glum look, but suddenly remembered something and turned his head to make a quick, instinctive glance back at Lightning Dust. Maybe . . .
***
Lightning Dust had zoned somewhat while Keto Profen was up at the stand, mainly trailing into thinking about what she could do for the next few days . . . since Keto had told her that she needed to draw herself away from just dwelling on the recent memory.
Keto approaching the picnic table suddenly drew Lightning's attention back, and she looked to see him coming up with a single scoop cone of vanilla ice cream for himself, and a single scoop cone of chocolate. Though, she quickly saw that the chocolate had sprinkles, but before she could react to the preconception that he'd known not to get her any . . . she saw the colors, and it brought a better, much happier memory snapping back from where it had been drowned out.
“Here,” he said, passing her ice cream cone to her.
She hesitated for a second, long enough to make Keto notice, though she still took the cone.
"Thanks,” she said.
“Is it . . . ok?” he asked, pleading inside that he hadn’t upset her by still getting sprinkles, “or did you just want absolutely none on it? Cause I know you sa-“
“Nah, it's . . . really alright,” she said, “I just haven't had anypony do something like this in a while.”
Keto heard Lightning's voice distinctly rise, a large amount of sullenness dropping out of it. “Somepony else did this before?” he asked, legitimately curious and hoping to aid in carrying on her sudden lightened mood.
In response to his question, and to Keto Profen’s unfounded disbelief . . . Lightning Dust not only smiled, but she also giggled. “Hmhmhahmhe, yeah, my big sister Lyra. Well, she always calls herself that, but she's only three years older than me. She used to take me by here, and there was another ice cream wagon. Hahahe, this one time, she did this too, made my colors with ice cream. Only, she did it by having the ice cream pony mix up Orange Sherbert and Cotton Candy flavor.”
It took him a few seconds to pull together a reaction of his own, shocked from her sudden elation. “Really? What kind of flavor mixture is that?” he asked, doing his best to sound lighthearted and just go along with her apparently happy memory.
“A really weird one,” she said through several seconds of laughter, then went on, “it's not like it was bad or anything; it actually tasted alright, it's just the way they mixed was . . . eh-not as good what they both taste like by themselves.”
“She did that because it was my birthday, just for the colors,” Lighting jumped into further explanation, “she had no idea what it was gonna taste like; she didn't even really like either flavor, just chocolate.”
“You like them both though? Ah-and obviously chocolate too, I'm assuming?” Keto asked on.
"Yeah; orange sherbert's my favorite. Chocolate kinda only grew on me. I started trying because it was her favorite . . . and, there . . . wasn't much we both liked, so it . . . I guess was one of the few things I . . .” she said, until her eyes drooped down to a groundward aim, and her head slumped down a little bit with them, all while she twisted a few noses to the side.
“But, uh y-it sounds like you two grew up really great together, or at least that you liked her,” Keto tried to turn her fluctuating emotional state back around again.
“Uh, yeah! She's my sister!” Lightning’s mood literally sprang back up, the ends of her mouth shooting skyward again, “I don't care that we couldn't really both DO a lot of stuff, Lyra is the best sister ever!”
Keto cringed back for a few seconds instinctively at her sudden forwardness and jump in volume. Though, after a quick moment, mostly since he sees the smile remaining on her face the entire time, he returns to normal as he realizes that she's not angry but actually just being boastful of her sibling.
“Well, ah, I'm glad you have really happy memories you can think back to, and I guess glad that I just somehow managed to accidentally bring these ones up,” he said then, very willingly admitting his reminding her being an accident.
Lightning's expression changed to a thinking one for a few seconds as she herself ran over all of the joyful flashes of the past that had just been coursing through her mind. She realized she really was feeling happy, no matter mild the feeling was.“Wait, what?” she asked, thinking out loud. Her mouth hung open as if she were about to say more, but couldn't reach any words as she lost herself in the sheer fact that she'd felt happy for the first time in 2 months.
Keto leaned a little ways forward and lifted his head up a couple of times, a motion to indicate for somepony to go on.
“W-ah-I actually really did feel happy,” she said, sounding as if she’d discovered something impossible, “. . . I haven't been feeling anything like I did for the whole time till I first came in to you, but I still haven't felt happy about anything since before the academy.”
“Really?” Keto asked, gaining a hopeful smile.
“Uh, yeah,” she said back, but then took a couple seconds looking him before she finished, “. . . hey thanks, a lot.”
“Huh? Why?” he asked right back.
“What do you mean what? For . . . this, making this happen, even on accident,” she told him, with a hint, just a hint of gratitude finding its way into her voice. She pointed a hoof at the sprinkles and asked, “why'd you even do this anyways?”
“Uh-uh, just to cheer you up,” he answered, faltering back into shyness about it, feeling himself becoming so hot under his fur from saying that, and his face turning a hidden red. But why? It annoyed him so much. It wasn't like what he'd just said was meant to be anything . . . or was he so anxious just because it could potentially be interpreted as something more? He'd never even tried anything like that; his anxiety disorder alone had been way too much of an inhibitor to start with, let alone going through Pharmacy School. Now, he practically didn't even think about it anymore, or at least not intentially. He did like Lightning Dust; she gave the feeling she was an amazing pony whenever she wasn't depressed, and he did seriously have to admire the exceptionally high degree of confidence she'd had. And, though she wasn't among the "type" of ponies that would be described using words like beautiful or pretty, she looked . . . well, Awesome.
Keto froze in his thoughts, struck by that sudden, overturning realization.
“Wow, guess you really like going over the top,” she suggested assumptively.
“Sometimes, for some things,” he said, “I try to do as much for my patients as they'll let me. Though usually that's just telling them way more about their medication than they would have asked about otherwise.” Keto Profen ended looking somewhat more than a bit regretfully embarrassed at his truthful remark. He'd kept a hoof-full more than a few patients at the consultation counter longer than they'd expected to be.
“Really I . . . hadn't been expecting you to tell me anything,” Lightning explained her own pre-visitation assumptions, “I kinda just thought I was gonna walk in and take the stuff and leave.” “I guess I was just only expecting that much after what my Doctor was like . . .” she added after.
“Well, uh a lot ponies kind of only think of us like that anyways,” he assured her, and basically speaking what most Pharmacists knew was the truth, “that's why some are usually annoyed when I don't let them leave until I tell them everything I think they need to know.”
If you hadn't,” Lighting started saying, “if it had just been what I thought, then . . . yeah, I don't know. I'd bet you could guarantee I wouldn't have been able to finally feel like this now.”
“Thanks for being like that,” she said through an exhale and a still-maintained smile, somewhat shyly herself.
Keto smiled: faint, and nervous, but also truly heartfelt. Regardless of his suddenly-realized liking of Lightning Dust, he felt so fulfilled right then, at her, a patient of his, telling him that he'd really helped her that much and helped start lifting her life back up.
“Well, it's not like I have anypony else to be,” he said, attempting to joke.
Lightning blinked for the second took to process his implying himself being multiple ponies, and somewhat to her surprise, she actually laughed.
“You really are feeling that much better?” Keto asked her, just wanting to hear her say so outright.
“Guess so,” she said back, sounding so upbeat, relative to what she’d been like since Keto had first given her her consultation three weeks ago. “Uuhh-I kinda still don't have anything to do,” she added on right after that.
“Oh!” Keto snapped his immediate memory forth and began bringing up his suggestion, “hey, about that, and I know you said you're . . . ah, kind of stretched for bits, but uh-she needs some help.”
“Just for a day,” he added on, “but, she needs somepony to run her little ice cream wagon.”
Lightning’s eyes went wide at her realizing his idea. “What, me?” she questioned him.
Keto in turn looked a surprised that she doesn't react positively towards it.
“. . . yeah. Is it-uh, th-you don't want to? Or . . .” he started cautiously asking, until she started answering, “ah . . . I don't know. I'm feeling, better, just, I don't know about that. I mean it's like a bunch of fillies and colts that go up there to ice cream most, right?”
“Yeah, they'll love somepony as awesome as you,” he tried to encourage her, sounding as bright as he could.
Lightning had no response to that. In the past, she knew, she would have said something like, "you bet!" or, "no doubt about it!" But, now . . .
“. . . Uh, hey, don't go getting the wrong idea. I'm . . .” she started to say, and struggled to go on, finding some remanent of her pride just then that wanted to hold her back from saying, “I'm not as awesome as you think I am.”
“H-hey, you don’t need to . . .” Keto started saying one thing, but chose mid-way to switch to another, “it's, um-not exactly like ah-ah . . . wait, no I mean I do . . . like you, you're an awesome pony, but i-it's not like I'm going foalish and idolizing you or anything. I mean, usually ponies idolize role models, older than themselves, and I'm like the same age as you. Or, uh, wait, how old are you? If . . . that's uh, alright?”
“Twenty-one. Why? What are you?” she answered, and then reflected the same question.
“I'm twenty-four,” he answered and said more, “so, actually even more unlikely then, since nopony's really able to idolize somepony younger than them. It doesn't matter even it's not really a difference. It's actually the older somepony is than you, the more you might idolize them, normally.”
“Yeah, I kinda know what you're talking about,” she responded, “and I know you're not a little colt. It's just . . . what I was saying was something else. I . . . almost hurt a lot of ponies, more than once. It was just so I could try to make sure I was the best."
“I always knew I was awesome,” she kept going, “. . . or I always used to tell myself that I was. But . . . I guess I never acted awesome towards other ponies.” Keto didn’t say anything immediately, not exactly knowing what to, so Lightning just ended up continuing speaking out her own introspection, “it's kinda easier to be that way when you're always getting ahead out of it. But . . . when you don't get anything from it to keep you going without thinking . . . all you have to end up with is just thinking about how you almost hurt everypony else.”
“Ah . . . uh-is that part of, w-what happened?” he asked cautiously, nervous about the reaction he might get.
Lightning's face just washed over with a clashing mixture of resentment and regret, and she looked away to the side to avoid holding Keto's gaze. It was more than enough of an answer for him, and plenty enough to make him feel quickly terrible for asking.
She snapped at him, instantly becoming defensive, “it was only almost; nopony actually got hurt! It's not like that's what I wanted!”
Keto cringed, half out of instinct, but also half out of sympathy, having just then been able to make a complete-picture, general assumption of what must have happened.
“The same thing would happen to me,” he starting telling her, “if, I messed somehting up, I'd have to be fired . . . and have my liscense to practice revoked, obviously.” That mentioning drew Lightning's head back in his direction. “But, I guess I'm kind of lucky I have an anxiety disorder then,” Keto went on, “there's no way I'd ever be completely calm enough to not second-guess myself on anything. So I kind of never had to learn that lesson, since I was always already so worried about screwing things up anyways.”
Lightning's expression turned bitter, and she turned her head away again, leaving Keto to sigh quietly and regret his stupid choice of what to say.
“I'm sorry,” he started, “I'm talking about myself like—”
“Just . . . stop, alright?” she stopped him, “I already did all that stuff. It's too late . . . I can't go back.”
In a way, Keto snapped, though not intentionally, and mostly without realization it. He didn’t yell or really even raise his voice all that much, but his eyebrows dropped to narrow his eyes. He couldn’t take her teetering on this edge. “Yeah,” he snapped at her, “but you can keep going somewhere. I mean . . . it's really horrible that you had to learn . . . what you did, like this. But I believe you; you're not evil or sadistic. Even the basic psychology courses we had to take in pre-Pharm are enough for me to know that almost nopony is JUST some way. We all live lives; things ... well, affect us, and sometimes . . . uh, ah-you mentioned something about your parents . . . not caring about you . . .”
Lightning was struck, very,very, very profoundly. Her eyes actually widened with utter shock. Nopony had ever . . . everypony had only ever just jumped right on her, said she was simply selfish, or dangerous, or . . . reckless. Nopony thought about why she did anything . . . or why she felt anything . . .
She just looked at him, blinking, with something she'd really never had before, only because she hadn't needed to: hope. Hope, and, maybe a spark of something else she didn't know . . .
“So . . .” Keto tried to sound encouraging, even though he was still asking tentatively, “well, do you wanna at least try this?”
Lightning thought about it, although enough of her confidence had apparently returned that she really knew from the instant began to think what her decision already was.
Author's Note
As promised, here's the fourth chapter. Finished everything up on the train ride up here (I'm in Baltimore right now, for BronyCon :)
I really hope everypony likes this one, cause I really did, we're getting to go a good deal deeper, even with Lighting Dust, but I feel as if I kept her still well within character
Anything anypony wants to ask or say, go ahead and comment. And don't forget to try to find me if you're here at the convention!
