Beneath Your Wings

Derpy Muffins flew a few laps around the recently-rebuilt store sign and anxiously landed a few feet away from the door. She was always terribly nervous meeting new ponies, because she knew that they would inevitably get super judgmental about her eyes, regardless of how they chose to express or attempt to conceal it. But then she realized that she was being ridiculous, because having this stallion judge her eyes was part of the primary reason she was even here. She could probably have gone to a regular eye doctor, but she didn't want everypony in town to know that she was aware of her own abnormality. They would probably feel just awful. The door opened before her hoof contacted it.

"Hello, Miss. Welcome to Beneath Your Wings, were we -I- strive to bring out the best flyer in you! Are you here about your ocular dystrophy, or perhaps something more general?" Torque immediately closed his mouth as soon as he realized what he'd said.

That kind of insensitivity is probably why he'd never get a real marefriend and should just learn to be appreciative of Lightning's abuse. But the second customer his probably-overpriced care and service station has ever had just smiled and nodded as she stood on her hind hooves and clopped her front ones together. She had a disposition which he found utterly strange in its light and warmth. To compare the two, Lightning's presence was like the blistering wrath which the first ponies to discover fire must have experienced when their entrancement by its violent beauty drew them to cooking themselves; whereas this new mare's was like the pleasant glow one could find by remaining a reasonable distance from it. The problem was that she did not seem prone to speaking, so he worried he'd never really understand what she wanted, which given his occupation, was a nightmare material of its own kind.

"Oh! Well, very well then. This will be quick. So much so, in fact, that unless you wish to make use of the other amenities here, I won't even charge you for my time. It just wouldn't be right." Torque said as he opened the door to the "clinic" side of his establishment and trotted through. "Please take a seat. I'll only be a moment!"

Derpy slowly and nervously sat in one of the plush lobby chairs and immediately bolted out of it when she heard a thunderous crashing sound out front. Her terror at finding out what could have made such a sound warred vigorously with her terror of the idea of being caught entirely off-guard by whatever it must be as she slowly turned to look. What she saw was a large pile of rubble where the sign she'd orbited just a few minutes ago used to be. Before she could find out the destruction's source, Torque returned with a white string with three large beads on it: red, yellow, and blue.

"All right, then," the stallion began, having apparently failed to notice the extremely visible destruction just over Derpy's shoulder. "I know this is strange, but I'm going to have to ask you to hold one end of this string in your mouth and look at these beads, okay?"

Derpy blinked in confusion, wondering why he would think it might be strange to hold something with her mouth until she remembered that he was a unicorn and they didn't often do that.

"Look, this isn't a prank, okay? I promise that this is how ocular convergence and divergence therapy works, at least on my budget." he tried to reassure her, worrying that his smile might look condescending or otherwise intimidating until she played along and took one end of the string in her mouth. Then he used his magic to move the beads until they were spaced a certain way along the string. The red bead nearest her face was half as far from the yellow bead in the center as that one was from the blue one at his end.

"All right, there you go. Now, please focus on the red bead until you can see the whorl patterns on it clearly...

Now the yellow and its ridges...

And the blue's dimples...

Back to yellow...

Back to red..

Yellow...

Red...

Yellow...

Blue... okay now release the string, please." Torque pulled the string out of her mouth, then out of the beads and disposed of it, then restrung the beads and put the partially-new assembly into a dish with a sealed lid.

Derpy was still watching him and waiting for the next exercise, having completely forgotten about outside when he turned and seemed surprised at her continued presence. She was too distracted by how sometimes she could see him and, well everything really, with greater depth and detail than she previously thought possible, for several seconds every third or fourth time she blinked.

"That was the whole therapy session," Torque said. "Would you perhaps like to reserve a bed or recliner? You're due for a massive headache in about half an hour or so."

Derpy was ruffled. He expected her to be driven to agony by a minute-long exercise? So in spite of his decidedly-less-haughty appearance than the unicorn stereotype, he was still arrogant enough to coddle her. But a scowl was not natural for her and therefore not long-lived on her face. Especially when she felt a slight twinge in both sides of her head and realized that she was the one being insensitive to how delicate unicorns must be about their heads. After all, everything they were was wrapped up in them. So she politely rented a recliner, which Torque had left her in with some soothing music while he went off to do... whatever.

Forty-five minutes later, Derpy felt like the recliner was her best friend in the world and her only anchor to sanity amid the unbelievable stabbing pain in her temples, and she clung to it like she was afraid that she was going to fall off.