He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

— Samuel Johnson

The rippling of the brook and the evening chorus of spring peepers grow louder as you approach. Still, the clearing and the cottage at its center seem unnaturally quiet. The untrimmed grasses on the roof have lowered green curtains over the door and windows. A stand of cattails has escaped from the stream and marched halfway across the strip of shorter, browner grasses that used to be a path. The land is slowly remembering its distant past, groping its way back to wild.

Inside, roots from above have found their way in, sending twisted dripping columns to the floor. Vines creep in through the windows you opened to let in air and light. The floorboards are already warped and covered with mold.

What you came for is in the entranceway closet, but you push past it, through the kitchen where she washed and peeled carrots, cucumber-roots, and lily shoots, past the oven where she baked bread made with flour from cattail pollen, into the bedroom. The ivy climbing over the window filters the sunlight outside into moonlight across the bed. The mattress has burst like a corpse, sawdust dripping to the floor where small creatures have torn out chunks of the cotton batting, and you remember:

You lie beside her in the moonlight, and run your hand slowly up her forehead, scratching backwards over the poll and down her crest. Then, more carefully, trying not to wake her, you stroke the softer fur under her throat. She opens an eye. It traces a leisurely path up your hand and arm, to your face.

“Take me to your world,” she whispers dreamily. You draw back your hand.

Never.

You spin on one heel and hurry out of the bedroom. The spare change bucket is just where she left it, on the second shelf in the entrance closet, ready to deal with a sudden shortage of seeds or vegetables. You grab a handful of bits from it and reach for your pockets. Of course you have none, so you take the bucket with you and push your way out through the grass overhanging the front door, coins clinking as the bucket swings.

One lone bird pecks hopefully at a spot on the hard ground in front of the empty henhouse. A late returnee who hasn't yet heard. You throw a few golden bits onto the ground. It jumps forward, cocks its head at them, and stares back at you, and you remember:

In the morning, you do the rounds together, scattering seed for the hens, grains for the mice, greens for the rabbits. Angel Bunny glares, angry at being demoted to outdoor rabbit, but still dashes forward for his carrot. It was his own fault. You have the scars to prove it. Human skin is more fragile than a pony’s.

You sense, as always, the strange mix of bliss and despair in your companion. Bliss when they take the food from her hooves, despair when they immediately carry it away. You’ve seen her lower her head to the grass beside her offerings, to eat alongside them. They stop and stare, bewildered, then place tiny paws on tiny hips. Rabbit feet thump the ground in impatience at her display, her attempt to be one of them.

“Take me to your world,” she'd said for the first time inside her cottage, where you both had retreated for breakfast after one such incident.

“You wouldn’t like it,” you'd told her. “Ponies are just animals there.”

She'd stared at you with those big liquid eyes and said, “I know.”

You'd frowned, and would have lectured her, but her nearness and her scent flashed images to your mind of what you did to her, with her, the night before. What she picked Angel Bunny up with her teeth, his legs flailing, and flung him out the door into the night for. You feel again your fingers digging into her withers, arms straining as you pull back and lunge forward, feathers brushing under your naked arms. And you ask yourself what the hell kind of man are you, to shy away from your own kind and spend yourself in something with four feet?

You’re like her. Hiding.

You wonder whether it even matters to you that it is this pony, or if any sufficiently-large mammal would have done.

It does matter. You understand each other because you both want the same thing. But only one of you can have it. A strange variation on the old question: Your place or mine?

“Take me to your world,” she asks you again in the evening, as you sit together in the solitude of the rabbitless cottage.

“Try this first,” you tell her. You grab her mane gently but forcefully, and half-push, half-pull her into the bedroom. There is no leather in Ponyville, but you think the green, woody vines you have collected will be both strong and pliant enough. Without a word, you lay her her face-down and tie one leg to each of the four posts of the double bed. You pull the vines tighter, spreading her wide. She looks like a deer or a turkey hung up to drain.

You walk around the bed, tickling her with a foot-long black feather that a raven or crow left in the yard the day before. Her nose, the insides of her forelegs, her belly. The hind ankle and fetlocks are especially sensitive.

You set the feather down and begin exploring her with hands and mouth, not paying any one part of her any more attention than any other at first. The tips of her ears, the downy barbs on the ends of her feathers—primaries, secondaries, and coverts—even the strange hard pit and mound on the underside of each hoof, fascinate you. You draw your fingers through her long, strong, hair, from her scalp to its tips, over and over, separating the tangles until the pink strands lie neatly parallel.

Some of these parts—not always the ones someone unfamiliar with her might assume—elicit a stronger response than others. A fingernail drawn up the small of her back, against the grain of the fur, causes shivers and makes her clench her hips. Gently sucking at the base of her ears makes her flail against the constraining vines with her left hind leg; her mouth opens in an “O” and spills out short bursts of surprise in time with the jerking of her body.

As a gentleman, you obligingly return to such spots more frequently. She draws in quick startled breaths, and lets out muffled cries and gasps. You bend over her and work faster. You find yourself breathing hard, in sync with her cries, but you hold back. You take her to the brink in one spot, switch at the last moment, escalate, switch again. You allow her no release.

The pitch of her cries tells you she has gone past the point where pleasure can be told from pain. You add a pinch here, a twist there, leave an impression of your teeth somewhere else. You slap her hindquarters harder than human skin could bear. Then you mount and inflict the final violation in one sudden thrust, and the two of you groan to each other roughly, in words so old they are known to all the two- and four-footed races, until you cry out together.

“Thank you,” she says when you finally clumsily untie her, your fingers slick with sweat, “but that’s not it, exactly.”

And it isn't, exactly, but it's close enough for now. The requests to take her to your world stop, and Fluttershy gathers fresh vines once a week.

Author's Note

I divided the story into tiny chapters to make it clear where the flashbacks end. It's 4 chapters & 4000 words total.