Hatebunny

This isn't possible, thought Angel. She's dead. She's gone.

And yet here she was, his aunt Leliel, standing over him with the small, sharp knife and jar for his blood like before, in the dusty and disused basement. Panic was crawling over his body, sitting on his chest and pinning his paws, but his mind - at least, the part which wasn't blank with terror - stubbornly refused to yield. It sent desperate urges to his limbs - Flee! Flee! - but they would not move. The cold iron restraints weren't necessary. Angel was paralyzed, somehow.

Leliel chuckled lightly and drew nearer. Angel's bulging eyes noticed something else - compact, dark and shiny shapes in the corners of the basement, half-hidden in shadows except for the glint of lantern-light on smooth carapace. A soft, excited chittering could be heard, like a chorus of distant and malevolent cicadas.

Changelings, thought Angel, with the deadness of inevitability. Somehow he'd known.

Leliel's chuckling turned into a gentle giggle, persistent and involuntary as only mania can be. It was a parody of her usual playful mirth. Her eyes flashed an intense green which enveloped her whole body, until there was only the cold glint of glossy chitin. This wasn't his aunt. Leliel would never have hurt him.

Another flash, and suddenly Angel was staring at his mother lying in her sick-bed, crippled and scarred, her disfiguring injuries transforming her into a stranger. She glared at him with accusation, painfully moving her twisted jaw to speak.

You killed her! she hissed venomously. You did this to me!

Angel was free now, somehow, standing over his mother, and backed away in fear, paws raised and shaking his head in dumb refusal. His faced contorted with shame and grief and he began to blubber; messy, wrenching crying. His mother's piercing green eyes, narrowed in hatred, slowly crinkled at the corners as she began a rising cackle. Angel stopped in confusion. Why was she laughing? He remembered something, and a clarity of perfect rage suffused his mind.

Angel's mother had blue eyes.

This is not my mother, he thought, rapidly closing the distance to the creature's bed.

This is a changeling, he thought, as he picked up the heavy brass lantern from the bedstand.

My mother is dead, he thought, as the creature's expression turned surprised, and he smashed the base of the lantern into its forehead.

This thing killed her, he thought, as the thing writhed groggily in pain, and soft fur became smooth exoskeleton under his paw. He brought the lantern down again, shattering the glass reservoir and wicking lamp-oil into the bedsheets.

This will stop if I kill it, he thought, watching the sheets catch alight and the changeling's head loll back into unconsciousness. Angel walked with surprising calmness, unrushed, to the door of the room, hearing the flames begin to crackle and sputter behind him. Accelerated by the lamp oil, the whole bed had come ablaze rapidly. Already he could smell the acrid stench of burning keratin.

Angel paused with a paw ready to close the door. He didn't really want to, but some compulsion turned his body for one last look at the funeral pyre of the thing which was not his mother, which had caused him such pain, and driven him nearly to madness. Before he had realised the truth.

The flames were nearly to the earthen ceiling, an impossibly rapid inferno. If he looked carefully, Angel thought he could make out a darker shape at the core of the fire. Bones could survive a fire, he knew - would exoskeleton? He had no intention of waiting to find out.
Suddenly something caused Angel's heart to leap. He thought there had been a stirring from within the flames - a twitch, a thrashing. It was hard to see. No, there - Angel's thoughts froze as his attention narrowed with painful intensity on the dark mass slowly, impossibly, raising itself from the straw mattress. It lurched from the bed with unnatural and resolute movements, unsteady but determined. As it shambled the floor, it thrust its head forward suddenly towards him, escaping for a moment the wreath of flames, and howled his name.

His sense broken, Angel slammed the door against the apparition and fled, stumbling the warren, seeking in vain an escape to the surface and away from this nightmare. That face… it was always in front of him now, imprinted on his eyelids, seared into his mind. It had been burnt, yes. Fur had melted onto skin like toffee, skin seared from flesh, flesh charred from bone. Teeth showing through where lips and cheeks were no more, one eye still glaring green and the other whitened with the heat, it was almost unrecognisable. Almost.

Fluttershy.