I almost wish that I had never stepped into that room...

Caramel woke up feeling very cold. This was odd, as there were plenty of blankets wrapped around him, and the breathing body of his special somepony, who generated warmth as most mammals do. Still, something felt very cold to him, a feeling that pervaded the entire room, even when he stepped out of bed and went to the bathroom to freshen up.

Putting the shower on as hot as it would go, he felt it sear into him. Still, the barrage of steam and boiling water did not gnaw into the cold, cold feeling that surrounded ever fiber of his body. After fifteen minutes of this, he finally surrendered, and stepped out of the shower, drying himself off with some difficulty. Being an earth pony had some disadvantages, after all.

Staring at himself in the mirror, he observed his messy, damp mane, and his tired eyes. These eyes seemed to carry a burden that forced down on his very soul, crushing him from the inside. He smiled, his face turning up, becoming friendlier, but the eyes stayed the same.

Carefully grabbing a hairbrush laying on the side of the sink, with both of his front hooves he brought it to his mane, carefully brushing out the bigger knots that had formed throughout his sleep and hurried drying of his body. Once they were dealt with, he moved onto a comb, spending his usual ten minutes of time preparing his mane to be just the way he liked it.

Leaving the bathroom, he knew he had to take extra care to go quietly down the stairs as to not wake the mare that had been sleeping next to him in bed. He stood at the top of the stairs, knowing that they top stepped creaked very loudly. But was it the next step down or the one after that that also creaked.

He decided not to take his chances with either, and instead climbed up onto the banister. Sitting on his stomach, he slid down to the lower floor slowly, teeth gnashing as his fur and flesh beneath was rubbed uncomfortably by the wooden railing. Finally reaching the end of his journey downstairs, Caramel hopped off of the banister and trotted to the kitchen.

He didn’t have time to make himself a proper breakfast. Instead, he grabbed a leftover daisy sandwich, one that had been made some time ago, to eat as lunch at his place of work.

Carefully, he opened the screen door at the far end of the kitchen, which lead to a path different from the one that lead from his front door to town. This one wound its way through some parts of the Everfree, but it didn’t go deep into possible danger territory. It was quite a lovely hike, though, the trees growing close together, the sun shining through on some day to tinge everything in a lovely, dappled green.

It was overcast today, however, so Caramel would get none of that. To the right of his house, where he had exited, was a field. The Everfree backed the house, and ahead of him one could see through the sparse trees was the town of Ponyville, just waking up. The winds would start blowing soon, maybe even a storm; Thunderlane, one of Caramel’s best friends, had told him to expect some turbulent weather this week.

Caramel stared up at the greying sky, then towards the roof of his home. There was a window, in which he could see the attic. From that window, assuming one was about the size of a foal, somepony could walk out onto the roof. He felt a small tinge of sadness seeing this; he hadn’t been to the attic in ages, not since he moved back into his home a year or so ago.

Staring up at the sky some more, he watched the clouds circle around in the troubled sky with the same sad expression on his face. The clouds were growing more and more restless by the moment; he was going to need to make haste to avoid getting caught in a downpour.

And make haste he did. Breaking into a trot from his little field, he moved towards a large gap in the trees near parallel to the back of his house, where the tall grass was beaten down, and one could see a small dirt path forming. Due to the early morning and the clouds, the sunlight did not make it down through the trees, so it was very dark. Caramel didn’t feel his usual twinge of fear, however— just the coldness from this morning growing larger.

The faint light from the gap in the trees that lead to his backyard cast creepy shadows over the pathway that snaked through the trees. After passing around a few bends, the light faded nearly completely, leaving Caramel in a very dark place. The coldness now felt almost... heavy. Spreading throughout his body, it was snaking down into his limbs, curling around his heart, creeping towards his brain...

He knew this path by heart, no matter how cold his heart was to become, so he traveled through the dark rather well. And when another faint light greeted him, he broke into a full gallop, rushing towards the exit of the foreboding forest.

He burst out on the other side, sudden expose of light hurting his eyes. He blinked, and found that it had not even begun to rain yet, although the air was heaven. A delicate sound of thunder rumbled across the sky, before a much louder, stronger one rushed past it. Caramel took this as a sign of him needing to stop standing there on the edge of the forest, and to head towards his destination.

He turned around, and there it was, just down the grassy slope of the hill the forest exited out on the top of. He trotted swiftly down the hill, advancing towards the large white building. It looked somewhat like Ponyville General Hospital, but... it was shorter: three stories tall. It also... felt different. The Hospital had a type of scariness to it, as if ponies who entered would not leave it. This place... it carried a pervading sense that let you know that nopony was going to leave, or at least, your chances of leaving were so slim that you might as well assume you are not going to leave. It was not a terror, like the one the Hospital possessed, but rather... a sadness.

Caramel walked past the well-kept sign that held the neat, loopy words “Ponyville Hospice” on them. He was near the glass doors, those doors that would take him to the next patient he was seeing. His last one had not been a very talkative pony. He had kept to himself, and Caramel delivered him books and newspapers, before he had passed away a week ago. Caramel had felt the sadness of seeing another pony go, but there had been no real connection between them. Caramel always felt he had to be detached, as to avoid emotional trauma every time he lost a pony.

He pushed open the glass door, and walked into the lobby. It had a few couches and some chairs, and a potted fern in one corner. In front of him was the countertop where one was to check in. A nurse sat there, absently flipping through a magazine.

Caramel coughed, and she glanced up. She nodded to him, tapping the clipboard laying on the counter. He took the quill in his teeth, signed his name on the paper under “visitation,” and set it back down. Caramel didn’t exactly work here, you see. The Hospice didn’t pay him to come and treat the patients, but they had been so grateful for his constant volunteer work that they had signed up a lease to help pay for his house, once he had decided to move back into it. Caramel felt that it was a symbiotic relationship; he came and helped them with patients, and they helped him with some of the issues in his life. He owed the Hospice anyway, who had admitted Caramel’s father free of charge so that his mother could raise him.

“Doctor Thead is near room 203, last I checked,” the nurse told him. Caramel murmured a small thank you, and left the employee to her business.

He walked through one of the archways to the side of the desk, and began his walk down the hallway. Various rooms and supply closets lined both sides, but his destination was the staircase at the very end of the hallway. Doctor Patch Thead was the head of staff at the Hospice, and was the one who decided which patients were given to Caramel. The Doctor was a stallion with a somewhat light personality, cheery even in this place of the dying. He didn’t spend a lot of time with patients, though, and was often in his office, which Caramel suspected was the reason he was able to keep such a light demeanor.

He trotted up the staircase, exiting out into the hallway on the second floor. Sure enough, there was Doctor Thead, checking a clipboard hanging on a closed door at the end of the hall.

As Caramel walked over, the doctor noticed him and smiled. “Caramel!” he announced, his voice a bit too chipper to suit the environment he was in. “Good to see you again.”

“Yeah, it’s good to be back,” Caramel said. “Well, sorta. Who do I have for my next patient?”

Doctor Thead nodded his head towards the door whose clipboard he had just been checking. “Thirty-two-year-old pegasus female. Terminal bone cancer. Most of the bone transplants failed, and they even botched up something when trying to do a transfusion, and she has a pretty bad infection, so there’s no telling which is gonna get her first. We’re running her on three thousand different pills, but that’s just going to delay the inevitable, and only for a short time.”

Caramel nodded. “Anything else I should know?”

“Yes,” the doctor noted. “She’s afraid of alarms. And by ‘afraid,’ I mean panic-attack-inducing levels of afraid, so try and make sure you don’t accidentally aggravate that.”

Caramel nodded once more. “Got it.”

“She’s all yours.” The doctor gave Caramel the clipboard with all the patient information on it, which Caramel took in his mouth. He slowly pushed open the door, and entered the dimly lit room.

The windows had curtains over them, and from the muted, static-like noise, he could tell that it had finally begun to rain outside. The figure, a pegasus with violet hair and a light grey coat that lay in the bed, was completely still, save for a few small breaths every minute or so. Her eyes were open. Blue, blue eyes, like tiny ice sheets...

He felt the coldness grab hold of his entire body, nearly dragging him down onto the floor.

Caramel cleared his throat, and the pegasus turned her head to look at the incoming Hospice worker. Caramel put down the clipboard on her bedside table, and smiled softly.

“Hello...” he looked at the clipboard to read her name, “Victory Rose? That’s a lovely name.”

She nodded, saying something in a tired sort of voice. “Yes, it’s a name that originated from far in the north.”

“It’s beautiful,” Caramel said. He meant it, too, apart from his usual flattery that he tended to work patients with. It really is.

“Well, Victory Rose,” he said, “I’m your worker. I’ll be keeping you company, fetching things you need, doing some very basic medical work, such as placing a line every now and then, or checking your vitals... which I actually have to do right now.”

Caramel busied himself into doing so. He removed the blanket, and took the required equipment from a medical cart that had been left in the room from earlier. Putting the stethoscope in his ears, Caramel put the end of the instrument to the pegasus’ chest, and began to listen.

“Alright, now breathe in...” he instructed, listening to the heartbeat and the respiratory system.

“Your hooves are freezing,” Victory said.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Caramel apologized, moving the end of the stethoscope slightly to the left. “I’ve been feeling pretty cold this morning, but I don’t really have any clear idea as to why...”

The pegasus nodded in response, and Caramel put the stethoscope back onto the cart. “Alright, your breathing seems pretty normal, I’m gonna go for blood pressure now.”

As Caramel reached for the instrument, he felt everything freeze over. Everything just seemed to be lost in a snow storm of freezing cold, like the entire room had been blanketed over in ice. When everything thawed out, he was sitting down on the chair next to Victory Rose’s bed, panting heavily.

“I think you’re the one who needs his vitals checked,” Victory said in a teasing voice.

“Nah, it’s fine,” Caramel said. “It’ll pass, I’m sure of it... What happened?”

“You took my blood pressure, but in this weird, detached way, almost as though you were sleepwalking, started tapping your hoof on my chest, then sort of wandered away towards the cart... then walked over towards the chair and started breathing heavily.” Victory looked over at him. “Doesn’t sound like it’s something that’ll just end up ‘passing.’”

“No, it’s nothing,” Caramel reassured her. “We’ve got to focus on you. Your vitals are essentially normal, and...” He exhaled loudly. “Well, now we’ve got time to talk. It’s my job, after all, to keep patients company.”

“Well, what do you usually talk about with the patients?” Victory asked, absently batting her morphine drip for a moment before stopping herself.

“About them, of course,” Caramel said with a smile. “What did you do before you fell ill?”

Victory thought for a moment. “I was a craftspony. I worked with gems in particular. I lived in Fillydelphia, but after my conditioned worsened, I asked to be transferred here to Ponyville. I grew up here.”

“When did you move?” Caramel asked.

“When I was ten, twenty-two years ago,” Victory Rose told him.

“That’s the same year around the time I was born,” Caramel said. “I didn’t move here until I was about ten myself, though, so... we missed each other by quite some time.

“What’s your family like?” he asked. This was generally a tricky question to go with, seeing as dying patients often became distraught about the thoughts of leaving their family behind, but he was getting a good feeling from this mare.

“Distant,” Victory commented. “Well, except for my son...”

“How old...” Caramel trailed off, feeling a pall of sadness fall over him. The mare was only Thirty-Two, so unless she had him when she was very young...

“Seven.”

Caramel and the mare stayed in silence, looking at each other. The rain outside pattered against the window, providing a very dreary atmosphere.

The sick mare in the bed coughed weakly, and pulled the covers up. “It’s freezing in here...”

Caramel nodded. “I know...”

But Caramel knew that his cold was from something else, something far more sinister than he could ever dare hope to imagine. Something terrifying...

“Hey, let’s see a smile,” Caramel suggested. “I think I’d love to see you smile.”

Victory Rose did not smile, however. Instead, she just stared at Caramel, looking at him, her eyes scrying, looking him over and over...

“There’s something about...” she noted, her voice trailing away as Caramel’s had done just moments before. “Bend down over me, so I can look into your eyes.”

Caramel obliged to this odd request, bending down so that the two were inches away from each other. Victory Rose smelled, predictably, of roses. Eastern Equestrian Rose, to be exact. Years of helping Roseluck in her garden had hard-wired Caramel’s nose for detecting the scents of different flowers, roses in particular.

She gazed into his eyes, and he looked back into her icy blue ones, feeling a shiver run down his spine as he did so. The temperature just kept falling and falling...

“There’s something odd about you,” she decided, and Caramel broke her gaze, moving to stand by her bed instead of leaning over her. “But I can’t decide what... there’s something wrong with your eyes...”

Caramel opened his mouth, but closed it shortly afterward, deciding to let her speak.

“And your voice... something in your tone...” She closed her eyes. “You sound so lonely, and it’s making me feel like... like I am too.”

Caramel’s eyes widened. This had never happened before! Sure, some of the patients had thought him to be too much of an overbearing presence, but none of them had ever had a problem with his voice...

“But you’re not alone,” he reminded her. “I’m here. That’s my job, to make you feel less...” he paused, blinking a few times. “Alone.”

“I think you should leave,” she told him. “I’ve got to sleep anyway.” The pegasus rolled over so that she was no longer facing the hospice worker beside her, and relaxed.

Caramel sat back down in his chair, denying Victory’s request. He simply watched her as she drifted off to sleep. After a good thirty minutes of sitting and thinking, slowly growing used to the cold feeling in the room, Caramel stood up.

Looking down at the patient he was to take care of, he felt something inside him that he hadn’t felt with his special somepony for ages, and something that pained him every time he looked at Roseluck.

Love.

He had no idea why he was feeling this. He already had to deal with... her at home, who he was supposed to love, and he was already being hurt by the love with Roseluck which could never be...

He barely knew her, too. However, many ponies spoke of love at first sight, and could this be it? There was something so wonderful that drew him to her; maybe she had what his special somepony lacked, and was able to love him back...

Judging by her comments, it was going to need some work, however. Besides, he hadn’t already given up on his special somepony, had he? What kind of pony would he be if he had abandoned her already, only after a few months? No, he would have to find a way to make that work.

But as he stared down at the pony sleeping in the bed before him, he also knew that he couldn’t ignore the feelings for her. He would have to develop something with her over the time he cared for her, that’s what he would have to do.

He casually glanced around, noticing that it was lunchtime already. Turning to leave, his eyes fell on the clipboard that lay on Victory’s bedside table.

“Terminal...”

The room became colder.