The grass beneath Silver Spoon’s hooves is wet with dew. The air is crisp and clean. She begins to walk, and then to trot. Up ahead, someone calls her name.
“Come on, Silver! Hurry up!” It is a high and strident call, demanding, but Silver Spoon’s heart quickens with gladness as she hears it.
“Coming, Diamond!” She breaks into a gallop, and tears across the meadow to where her friend is waiting. Her silver-white braid bounces against her neck with every stride. A smile spreads across her muzzle as she runs. It’s a brand new day, and she gets to spend it with her best friend in the world.
~
The door to the small white chamber opens and an elderly mare enters. She wears a white coat tailored to fit her sinewy body exactly; a perfection that speaks of expensive taste and careful attention to fashion, even here in this least fashionable of places. Her mane, carefully swept back into a practical bun, is a greying purple shot through with a single streak of blue.
As she moves slowly across the room to the bank of cupboards on the far wall, the tiny pony on the stool in the room’s centre looks up. The filly blinks big purple eyes and her face spreads into a smile.
"Hi! I'm Silver Spoon and I'm the Perfect Patient! What medical symptoms would you like to treat today?"
The mare doesn’t look at her; she busies herself digging a notebook and pen out of the cabinet, holding each in her magic while she rummages with her hooves. A kettle and a succession of building blocks soon follow the notebook into her magical field.
The filly waits patiently, and eventually tries once more. “Hi, I’m Silver Spoon and I’m—”
“—I know.” The mare cuts her off impatiently, before schooling her face into a more forgiving expression. “Nice to see you, Silver.”
“What medical symptoms would you like to treat today?”
“The usual, please.”
The filly frowns and taps one hoof against her lip in thought. “A surprise?”
“Yes.” The mare gathers her assortment of items and settles herself on her haunches against the far wall with a sigh. “Princesses, I’m getting too old to be squatting on the floor. Has no pony ever thought about putting some seats in here?”
The filly, eyes screwed shut in concentration as she thinks, pops one eye back open. “You can have my seat, if you like, Doctor Starlight!”
“First time patient assessment, please, Silver Spoon,” snaps the mare, and Silver Spoon nods hastily.
She slips down from the stool and trots to the furthest corner from Starlight. Once there, she clears her throat and knocks her hoof three times against the linoleum floor.
Starlight makes one minor adjustment to the items arrayed before her, flicks a stray strand of hair away from her eyes, and straightens. “Come in!”
The filly approaches, her demeanour changed. Her gaze fixed on the floor, ears flat to her skull, she shuffles toward the doctor, all but trembling as she moves.
Starlight shifts gears and adopts a comforting tone. “Come in, sweetheart. Sit down. What’s your name?”
Shivering, the foal obeys. “S-Silver Spoon, Miss.”
“I’ve got some toys here, Silver Spoon,” Starlight says kindly. “Would you like to play with them with me?”
The foal shakes her head, but after a little cajoling, she tentatively reaches for the blocks.
Starlight keeps her voice low and sweet. “So, Silver, why have you come to visit me today?”
Silver shrugs, the gesture tight and small. She shuffles the blocks into piles — oblong, cube, arch. All the types separate. “Mommy said I had to.”
“Why do you think your Mommy wants you to talk to me?”
A sniff; the filly is close to tears. Her hooves move constantly. The piles are each sorted by colour and shade. “Don’t know.”
“Is there anything that worries her?” Starlight pauses delicately. “Anything you might worry about, if you were Mommy?”
Silver Spoon gulps, and a single tear creeps from her eye. The cubes are arranged in a perfect grid pattern, all the angles exact. “I have…bad thoughts,” she says at last in a whisper.
“Bad thoughts?” Starlight leans in like a dog with a scent. “Can you tell me what they are, sweetheart?”
“I think about…” The tear plops to the ground. The cubes are also in their own symmetrical grid. A hoof reaches for the arches.
“About?” The voice is infinitely gentle.
“About…hurting ponies.” The arches align like a heavenly choir, each one in their place.
The scratch of pencil on paper. Starlight’s eyes are gleaming. “Hurting ponies?”
“I don’t want to,” Silver Spoon answers in a whisper, more tears following the first. “But the thoughts go round and round and I can’t—”
“—Enough,” Starlight says triumphantly. “I’ve got it! OCD with generalised anxiety.” She leans forward, an avid grin on her face. “Right?”
The foal smiles and straightens, tears forgotten as they trickle down her cheeks. “You got it, Doctor Starlight! It never takes you long.”
The doctor makes another note. “Always good to stay in practice. Can’t let myself get rusty.” Already she is rising to leave, the toys floating away to their places in the cupboards, escorted by the blue magic.
The foal smiles again, an edge of something undefinable in her eyes. “Thanks for the visit, Doctor Starlight! See you next time!”
The door swings shut behind that tailored white coat. There is no reply.
~
“You’re too slow, Silver Spoon! Hurry up or I’m going without you!”
Diamond Tiara is still far in the distance, but Silver Spoon can hear her friend as clear as if they were right next to each other.
“Don’t be silly!” she laughs. “You won’t leave me.” But all the same, she ups her pace.
The dew twinkles in the sunshine, but the first grey clouds mar the blue sky.
~
“Good morning!”
The cheery greeting is music to the foal’s ears, and she beams back at her visitor. “Good morning, Surgeon Redheart! I'm Silver Spoon and I'm the Perfect Patient! What medical symptoms would you like to treat today?”
The aged surgeon, face heavily scored with wrinkles and mane long since devoid of colour, frowns as she thinks.
“We’ll go with a carriage crash today, I think. Thirty miles an hour, critical wounds to the abdomen, and throw in a broken leg, please. Hind left.”
“You got it!” Silver Spoon chirps, and then she shuts her eyes. Her pupils move rapidly beneath the lids and then she sucks in a breath. A whimper escapes her lips, and then a sob.
A thin line of pink appears on her stomach as the surgeon watches. It spreads across her ribcage, widening like a bizarre smile, and then blood begins to drip from the wound. The filly’s rear leg gives a minuscule shift, and then all at once is wrenched to the side by an invisible force. The wound on the stomach splits open all at once, and a sea of viscera flops from it, red and wet and steaming.
And then the filly begins to scream.
Despite her age, the surgeon moves quickly. The passage of time has made her scalpel shakier, but her wits are as sharp as ever. She flips the patient onto her back, reaching for her sutures as she does, and the gore trails across the floor behind, leaving a horrible trail of blood.
“Abdominal wound first, obviously,” Redheart mutters. “Though I think you went a bit overboard — this from a thirty mile an hour crash? Never mind, patch it up, patch it up.”
The needle flashes, and the filly screams. Her throat is raw and her lungs are burning, and her world is just one sea of raw red agony and —
“Deactivate vocal chords.” The surgeon’s voice is tight with stress, but suddenly the room is silent.
Redheart frowns in concentration as she spoons the bloody mess back into the child. Silent tears fall and a little mouth gapes open in an inaudible moan.
A huff of annoyance. “Stop looking at me that way. I’m trying to concentrate. Deactivate pain response.”
The expression melts into blankness. The surgeon’s hooves are a blur, but the injury is too severe. The patient is fading, fading…her eyes slip shut, and it is over. The heartbeat stills. The white-furred surgeon in her white coat kneels over the corpse, bathed in blood from head to hoof.
She gives a sigh of disgust and pushes the body away. “Reassemble.”
On cue, Silver Spoon’s innards flow up and in, her intestines perfectly refolding themselves back into her stomach. Even the blood gathers itself together and crawls up her thigh to make its way back to the slit in her stomach. The wound knits itself back together before her staring eyes, and only the dried stains on the floor show that she was ever injured at all.
“Hook yourself up to the blood generator,” Redheart says shortly. “You’ll need more after all that.”
Still muted, Silver Spoon can only nod.
The door slams shut.
~
Silver Spoon is running, running, running, but Diamond Tiara is still a distant purple haze on the horizon. She turns toward Silver Spoon, but her face is shadowed, and Silver cannot make out her eyes.
Her legs pumping, Silver Spoon strains to reach her friend. But Diamond Tiara is already turning to leave, and it is like Silver’s legs are moving through treacle. No matter how hard she pushes, her hooves slip and slide on the wet grass. Her fur is slick with water, and she can feel it weighing her down.
“Diamond, wait! Wait for me!”
But that shadowy figure does not wait. Does not turn. And there is pain in Silver’s legs, burning pain shooting up and down her nerves, through every fibre of her being. She staggers and falls, the impact of her chest on the ground sending another wave of agony up her spine.
Coughing and retching, she scrambles to her feet, but when she looks back to the point on the horizon where Diamond Tiara was, she sees only green fronds, waving and waving in a nonexistent breeze.
The grass beneath Silver Spoon’s hooves is hot and wet. She looks down and the dew has turned to blood. Ruby and vermillion and ochre, every shade of red, a rainbow of blood. Her heart is pumping frantically and with every beat she can see more of it forced out from the wound on her stomach onto the red red grass. And more slits are opening — on her legs, on her neck, on her face. She is weeping blood, she is haemorrhaging it, it is forcing its way up her throat and oozing out over her tongue to drip from her mouth in long brilliant strings of crimson spittle.
~
“Hey, Silver! I brought you some doughnuts—” The greeting is cut short and the doughnuts fall to the floor as the mare with the white-streaked mane stares aghast at the scene before her.
Blood spatters disfigure the pristine white walls and coat the floor an ugly shade of coagulated red. A small grey shape, stained too in scarlet and amaranth, huddles in the corner, a brilliant red tube bearing more of the stuff from a tank in a cupboard to a vein in her foreleg.
The mare’s face falls and she stretches out a hoof. “Oh, Silver.”
The foal flinches hard and ducks away, shivering.
The doctor, robed in a white coat like all the others, stamps her hoof hard enough on the floor to hurt. “Oh stars, those morons! Why do they never wipe the records like I tell them?” There are tears of frustration in the mare’s eyes and she dashes them impatiently away.
The foal shudders.
The mare collects herself. “Are you muted? Unmute.”
“H-hi, I’m S-Silver Spoon and I — I — I—” She dissolves into tears.
The doctor is almost crying herself. “Oh, princesses. Wipe everything since my last visit, Silver.”
“Please wait.” Silver Spoon shuts her eyes for a moment and her expression softens. When she opens her big purple eyes again, she smiles. “Doctor Tiara! How are you?” She remembers herself and quickly rattles off her spiel. “Hi! I'm Silver Spoon and I'm the Perfect Patient! What medical symptoms would you like to treat today?”
Doctor Tiara gives a shaky laugh, relief washing over her. “No need for any symptoms today, Silver. I’m just here to socialise.”
Silver Spoon frowns. “But there have to be symptoms. I’m a medical diagnosis and analysis practice androi—”
“—No, I know what you are.” Tiara raises a hoof to stop her, and then sighs. “Fine. I know you’re not her. But…let’s go with the original anyway.”
“Um, I don’t have any records of that setting.” Silver Spoon waits, eager to please but uncertain of what to do.
Doctor Tiara tries to laugh, but it’s a melancholy sound. “Alright — go with mild anxiety. And activate short-sightedness, left eye 1.2B and right eye 3.2A.”
A pause, and then Silver Spoon looks up. She takes a few steps forward and immediately collides with the stool. “Ouch!” She rubs the afflicted area, before looking up at the pink-furred mare with a sheepish grin. “Oops…I think I…I might need some glasses? Can you give me an eye test, Doctor?”
The mare smiles. “No need.” She reaches into a pocket and produces a pair of small blue glasses, the plastic frames faded with age.
Silver Spoon reaches out eager hooves and settles them onto her nose. “Wow! These are perfect!”
“I thought they would be,” Doctor Tiara chuckles. “Now, how about those donuts? They’re a little smushed, but that never hurt anypony.”
~
Diamond Tiara has vanished, but Silver Spoon knows she must keep running. She has to. If she can just keep moving, she will find her friend. Surely, she will find her friend?
Thunder rumbles, and the rain begins to fall.
~
The door opens, white plastic swishing over linoleum, and Silver Spoon looks up, bright smile at the ready. It only falters a little when she sees her visitor’s face.
“Good morning, Miss Glow,” she says, politely enough.
Cozy Glow looks down at the small foal before her and a smile spreads over her face. She kicks the door shut with a rear hoof, and Silver Spoon flinches at the sound.
“Good morning, Silver Spoon,” she replies, and her voice holds such a promise of what is to come that Silver Spoon feels hot liquid trickling down her legs.
Cozy Glow sees the yellow fluid and laughs. “They really do think of everything, don’t they?”
Silver Spoon swallows hard enough to hurt. ”H-hi. I'm Silver Spoon and I’m…the Perfect Patient. What medical symptoms would you like to treat today?"
Cozy Glow smiles wider. “Same as always. My own.”
The foal backs away, but the room is small and her rump collides with the wall all too soon. “W-well it’s really supposed to be me—”
“Oh come on,” grins Cozy, wings flaring as she advances. “You know this is part of my treatment. Doctor Starlight’s orders. I need to have an outlet. She said so herself.”
Silver Spoon feels tears crowding in her eyes. “B-but I’m meant for doctors to practice on—”
“And my doctor said you’re for me to practice on,” retorted Cozy. “Same settings as always, please. Dial up that pain response and really don’t hold back on the volume. And the memory is same as always, too — wipe it until you see me next.”
“C-confirmed,” whimpers the foal, and the pegasus smiles and reaches out a hoof.
