Hatebunny

Angel lay on his back in the long grass and stared at the bright, lazy clouds as he raised a paw to feel the wetness on his face.

It's not rain, he realized.

He must be crying. He'd forgotten what that was like.

Days had passed since, angry and unthinking, he'd bitten Fluttershy. She'd maintained an iron silence since then. Nopony could do silence quite like Fluttershy. Angel kept expecting it to blow up into an argument, but that was just old fears resurfacing. Fluttershy was not like his mother.

Those had been some bad years. After the collapse, which the warren clan had insisted on calling "that terrible accident", Angel had learned the hard way that it was easier to keep the truth to himself. Especially when his mother, who had been upstairs and was mangled beyond recognition, had finally left the hospital and returned home. Her physical injuries were far worse than Angel's, and she didn't quite look or move the same afterwards. She behaved differently, too, become bitter and cruel. The loss of competence she found infuriating, but worse was the loss of her beloved sister.

Angel's insistence that Leliel had... done whatever it was she had done... did not receive a sympathetic hearing. The other bunnies just thought he was crazy, somehow damaged by the event. They were right, but not in the way that they thought. His mother, however, made it clear that she saw his accusations as calculated malice against the defenceless dead. Whenever he tried to explain, she would look at him with disgust. Liar, she would scream, green eyes glinting with fury. Angel later realised that, in her grief and anger, she had needed someone to blame - and she blamed him. At the time, he'd had no such insight. He only knew that his mother was growing to hate him, and that everyone else thought he was insane. He was alone. As the years had gone by, that isolation and ostracization had become entrenched, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The glowing clouds coasted on, their easy, carefree drifting making strangers of them. Angel knew, cognitively, that they were pleasant to look at, but that knowledge was only thought-deep. He couldn't access the pleasantness, draw it into his lungs; his body was closed to it. The day was unseasonably warm, but a cold breeze explored the fur around his face and ears, highlighting tear-dampened patches. Angel knew he should get up and go home before the early-spring evening banished the importunate heat.

It should be raining, he thought, not moving.

No, Fluttershy was not like his mother. But they now shared the same mistrust, the awful silence which they dare not break for fear of what might fill it. Angel had no idea what had made him bite his friend and caregiver. Unlike with his mother, Angel had never had dark fantasies of hurting Fluttershy, of holding her underwater, or burying her under shovelfuls of dirt, or-

Angel stopped and shook his head, afraid and ashamed of his own thoughts. Maybe he was crazy. He'd begun to believe what they had been saying about him. Liar. Deranged. For a long time he allowed those words to echo in his skull, and they had hollowed him out. Just as, now, the memory of biting Fluttershy's smooth hoof was playing over and over in his mind...

Back then, however, he had slowly begun to see what the others did not - that the bunny who tormented him day after day was no longer his mother, not really. It was apparent in subtle little things - an altered turn of phrase, a way of moving. Above all, it was the cold green sharpness that had entered her eyes. But he said nothing. He knew nobody would understand. No, Fluttershy was not like his mother. The angry green flash of her eyes was just old memories leaking out, never far below the surface.

Impassive and unconcerned, the clouds floated on.