Nurse Redheart hated her cutie mark. Nurse Redheart hated her job. Nurse Redheart hated helping ponies.

Nurse Redheart sighed. Or at least she tried, though it sounded more like a ragged pant as she ran down the long hallways of the hospital. Jumping to the side to avoid bumping into a wayward stretcher, she felt the container around her barrel whip around and smack into her legs. She hated doing this. And “this” happened often.

It seemed like every other day a pony would crash into a tree or drop a piano on another pony—Redheart had spoken to Derpy about that, but she couldn’t blame her with her heterotropia—as if they had a religious belief deep down that Ponyville’s Hospital could fix them as good as new. Without trouble at all.

Now, some things are unpreventable, like illnesses, but some of the ponies in the town could only be described as stupid.

How does a mare, the assistant in a bakery, expect her friend to make cupcakes with her and sell them to customers? Nurse Redheart was pretty sure there was a law somewhere saying that was illegal, or at least someone to frown upon it with the dozens of ponies that the mare had given food poisoning.

That mare Rainbow Dash? Yeah, she’s here every month for some accident, always the result of overworking or putting her goals too high. Nurse Redheart expected her to be crippled after the sixth incident with the way that mare acts. At least she wasn’t, thankfully.

Rounding the corner, Nurse Redheart could see the two white doors at the end of the hallway. A large sign above the doors had two black, bold letters against white.

The emergency room.

The blandly white room surrounded by equipment and sectioned off for multiple patients. Redheart was always nervous whenever a patient was brought in. Usually a patient means a challenge. A challenge meant something that she couldn’t heal. Couldn’t fix.

Bursting in, the room was a calm mess. Doctors and nurses alike were working with the patient, but you could tell with the nervous looks upon their faces that they were wrestling to keep control over the situation. It’s always like this. No matter how a situation was, there was always the fight to keep it from spiraling from control.

Catching the eye of another nurse, Redheart handed over the small package. It was blood packets, full of O-negative blood. With a quick glance at the label, the other nurse started prepping the intravenous lines. No one was able to tell what blood type the patient had with leftover magical energy from the wound hindering any attempt of finding out using a horn, and there was no time for a physical test.

Apparently a stallion had been trying to long-range teleport his best mate and ended up teleporting every part of his friend except a large section of the fur and a little bit of flesh on the pony’s right side. This is why ponies don’t usually teleport themselves, and especially other ponies unless they are fully capable of doing so.

Not only was it traumatizing for the pony who got mostly-teleported, the stallion somehow managed to teleport his friend onto the dinner table of a foal having a cutecenera. According to the stallion that had brought the victim here, he had thought it would be a good idea to trick the young foals with a prank, the teleporting earth pony. Instead there was blood everywhere, according to the ambulance ponies. Sadly, not all cuteceneras are full of fun times and happy ponies. Redheart’s own wasn’t as happy as she’d liked.

Now there was probably a filly somewhere washing blood out of her coat. Now there was a pair of very disappointed parents. Now the mostly-teleported pony was here, most of his barrel covered in blood. One could barely tell that the original color of the fur was a pretty light blue under the coat of crimson.

Trotting to the side, Redheart found the box of disposable latex gloves and put them on.

Carefully moving on her hind legs to the front as to not dirty the gloves, she observed the treatment. Too many times has Nurse Redheart seen a pony bleeding. Probably more than some of the older doctors, actually. Depends on what they did.

As she looked on, a nervous unicorn doctor began preparing a spell to clean the wound of magical energy, a necessity for wounds sustained from magic. With a quick flash of light, it was over and no more than a wisp of bluish color was left.

By the time this had finished, Redheart had donned a facemask. Not really a necessity when a pony was bleeding to death on the table, but nice nonetheless.

The nurse next to Redheart had rummaged through a cabinet and grabbed a simple opaque bottle. She shoved a bottle into Nurse Redheart hooves before she began another task. Nurse took the bottle in her hooves and screwed the lid off with her mouth. Maybe the facemask had been a good idea. She would have to make sure she did it more often. After the quick note, Redheart tipped over the bottle over the stallion, splashing the saline on him and a few nurses in the process. Better overdo things than not. The saline would flush the physical wound, unlike the magical purging the doctor had done.

The clear liquid mixed with the crimson, running down to pool on the stretcher.

As soon as Redheart tipped the bottle away, a nurse was pressing a towel onto the wound while another was bringing up some bandages. The nurse motioned for Redheart to take her place, and she moved over to allow for the shift.

Nurse Redheart has gotten blood on her coat before. It was easy to tell when this happened, as her coat was a pristine white. It wasn’t anything more than a nuisance, however. Nurse Redheart always showered like she had blood in her coat, it was a habit. Actually, it was acceptable for ponies of the emergency room to not have full body protection. Because of the time required to don even an apron for an earth pony, the practice was discontinued for fear that time would be essential or the clothing would get in the way. Aside from the gloves, the only clothing that Nurse Redheart wore was her cap—or would have been wearing. She grimaced when she realized it must have fallen off sometime in her mad dash here. Another note, this time to find her cap.

Some blood has stained the tips of her gloves red by now.

At least it looked like the bleeding was slowing. A doctor gently shoved Nurse Redheart out of the way to apply the bandages. Nurse Redheart wasn’t even sure if the bleeding had completely stopped. It wouldn’t. Not with this stallion’s wounds. It wouldn’t matter, anyway. One of the doctors who until now had been standing off to the side began to prep an autologous skin graft. If Redheart heard correctly, it would be a split thickness. Probably best for a graft of this size.

It was ugly. The skin underneath the fur was an angry red. As soon as the doctor used a combination of his magic and a dermatome to cut into the fur of the stallion, Redheart could see the sliced areas begin to shine red. When Redheart had been taught to use one, she had no magic. She never had to use one, but the process would have been uglier than this. Messier. A manual dermatome always produced less attractive results compared to a magically powered one.

Still, watching a doctor peel off sections of the stallion’s skin wasn’t amusing. Taking from the inner thigh, the doctor began handing sections of the skin to a nurse, who used a skin mesher to stretch them out into thin sheets before laying them onto the uncovered side of the stallion. Then another doctor would sew on the sheets.

It was lucky that the stallion had lost next to no flesh. It simplified things, and Redheart liked simple. Why couldn’t everypony just get hurt in simple ways?

After the patient had stabilized and everypony was sure that he was in a good condition, Nurse Redheart watched as a few ponies wheeled the stretcher away to the intensive care unit. As soon as the doors shut, she tore off her gloves with taut snaps and threw them into the proper wastebin. The facemask soon followed. Checking herself, it was a pleasant surprise to see that she had made it through the ordeal without staining her coat with blood, as unlikely as it was. That was always a welcome sight.

Moving to the sink, Nurse Redheart scrubbed her hooves in the stainless steel washbasin. It always felt like her hooves could never be clean enough. It wasn’t because they were dirty, it was just another habit. Something simple that could keep her anchored.

When it felt like they couldn’t get cleaner, she dried her hands and finally left the ER. A quick check of the clock told Redheart that her shift had ended a while ago. A quick trot down her earlier path revealed her cap lying in a corner. Somepony had trampled it. Straightening it out, Redheart tucked it on her head and continued walking.

When she finally trotted out of the service exit of the Ponyville Hospital, Nurse Redheart gave a tired sigh. The night was beautiful, and she thought that it was a sort of belated peace for her. In a way, Redheart’s favorite time was nighttime. Nighttime meant that the day was over, that it was time to clean up and settle down. That whatever challenges that the day held were over.

However, it also meant that everything was over.

Staring into the night, Redheart once again found herself thinking of lost possibilities she had passed without a second thought in her life. She knew it was pointless, even negative, to consider things past but she found that it always wormed its way into her brain like a parasprite eating away at her. Maybe she could’ve been a daycare worker. She loved foals. A secretary? She was neat. She was literally trained to be organized.

Anything but a nurse. A nurse means somepony has been hurt and needs help. A nurse helps ponies. Nurse Redheart has helped too many ponies in her life and been a nurse, a medic, too long. Her being a nurse was literally branded on her body. The mark of a nurse.

She sighed.

Nurse Redheart hated her cutie mark.

Author's Note

"Ignavi coram morte quidem animam trahunt, audaces autem illam non saltem advertunt" -Julius Caesar

Sed quae indignus est ignavi qua suam officium bene meret?