The visitor walks into the hospital, a building finely laced with the non-familiar, somewhat austere aroma of stern nurses and delirious old colts, swinging a sagging bag of flowers with gift shop origin. Tulips, the preferred choice of the gift's beneficiary. After a few elevator rides and reaching the lined door marked with a faux gold plaque (it reads 27-A), she pushes it open with a solitary hoof and tries to contain a verbal grievance. It wouldn't be troublesome if she could not control such a noise in the first place, nurses in the hospital are used to such a sound and the mare in the room wouldn't have been able to hear her anyway. But she has to keep a straight face. Getting a firm grip on the heaving chest, she announces something tentatively to access the fragile attention of the one in the bed, the mare in question embellished by red wires connecting her body to virtual support, before the visitor shoves her hoof up her mouth in light of her unintentional insult. The bedridden horse does not take notice. She is too busy counting the diverse variety of plaster cracks on the dulling wall dotting the horizon of her legs to take notice. It is doubtfully that she is even aware of her friend's presence. It is not the visitor's fault for making such a mistake, her hoof still firmly lodged in mouth, the new condition of her friend will just take an extensive span of time to become fully acquainted with. This is provided she doesn't leave the mare who appears to be dumbly staring ahead at the wall just at the foot of her bed. She won't, she promises to herself. For the meantime, any verbal communication is off limits and rubs salt in the wounds of her hospitalized friend. And she makes the first step of many.

Only now does the mare recognize the presence of a visitor, not by the sound of her hooves but by the brash shadow that dares infiltrate the complex system of lines running through Steve. Steve is what she named the wall, not because she was lonely in her confinements but because it simply looked like a Steve. She half expects a parade of paparazzi to waltz into the room after her friend, for she can only imagine that about half of the Gabby Gums network is creating a semi circle around the ER - after all, it isn't just everyday the eardrums of a famous dubstep trailblazer decide to rupture mid concert - but fortunately the hospital has denied the fervent troupes any and all access to her peace. It isn't as if she'd be able to answer their questions, in any case. The shadow takes a chair next to her bed and slowly takes the form of a familiar face. Octavia now smiles down on her, the drugs slowing down the reaction time of the disabled mare. It's the first time that splintered chair has been used in about a week, probably on account of the splinters themselves, but the instrumentalist doesn't seem to mind. The invalid mare has been solitary in the hospital for a while, albeit the influx of nurses bearing food and the doctors bearing more ill news.

She takes to the food better.

Octavia starts to form a string of words, but soon realizes how useless they will be and discards them in favor of more positive facial expression, furthering the awkward silence that her friend has so soon grown accustomed to. Her eyes fall on a clipboard hanging for dear life from a chipped metal rung at the bed's edges. "Patient No. 3891", it reads. "Vinyl Scratch". Listed below are the logistics of her reason for hospital admittance (the medical terminology is odd, but from what she can understand, this hearing loss prominent in her friend is due to some sort of infection), numerous treatments, diagnoses, differing restatements of "improbable chance of regaining hearing", etcetera. A cold wind pushes through her skin, and at first she thinks it's a side affect of observing the aforementioned words in black and white, no misinterpretations from a shaky voice belonging to a hospital secretary over the telephone, one AM, shortly after the accident. But Octavia is looking too much into it, and theorizes correctly that perhaps the wind is created not by symbolic angst but by the overzealous news anchor with fake blonde mane extensions who used an unguarded back entrance to force the creation of an interview in the name of the freedom of the press, her cronies who all boast twenty inch high cameras rolling live to national television. There's a microphone tapping Octavia's face impatiently that is guarded by a field of rattled questions, ones she can't interpret and doesn't have to thanks to hospital security, who drags the crew away shortly after. The tabloids will surely slather scandal all over this incident, "Octavia Melody Hires Secret Police to Dispose of Innocent News Cast".

Vinyl, for the first time in weeks, smiles and reaches for the bag brought in by Octavia, pulling a red wire along with her. The machine gripes under the sudden movement. She pulls out a wilted flower and pops it into her mouth. Tulip, her favorite. Her stomach is being punctured by millions of invisible nails and smiling is the last thing on her mind, but she doesn't want to discourage her only guest in this past week. Vinyl had enough friends to fill an oversized mosh pit (which she had learned during her twenty third birthday the year prior after one phone call to enforcement from angry neighbors and twenty minutes of scrambling over bodies away from rampant police dogs later) but they were either all off on tour overseas in Prance or had schedules too active to manage a visit to a hospital in the beaten countryside. Her parents weren't coming around, as far as she knew. Her Dad was off in Las Pegasus spending his child support on hookers, and that was the last she heard of him four years ago. As for her mother, Vinyl knew from experience that hospitals usually frowned upon letting pot dealers into their facilities. Octavia is the only one she has.

So begins her silent world.


AN) I have no idea where I'm going with this story or how long it will be. It was originally supposed to be a oneshot, but I didn't know how to end it "correctly", so there you have it.

Sorry if it's a little confusing.