Hatebunny

Sometimes, Angel thought, it's hard to tell if you're awake.

His nightmares - memories twisted into phantasmagoria of truth and imagining - had been getting more vivid and urgent recently. He'd heard that, for most creatures, sleep was an escape, a restful respite. For him, it was merely another theatre of anguish. He'd sleep, and his dreams would be fantastically unbearable. He'd awake, and remember. The true horror of what had happened - and what he'd done - which was all the worse for being real. The two seemed like equivalent realities, overlapping and bleeding into one another. There was no escape; not under Celestia's sun nor Luna's moon.

"Come on, Angel," said Fluttershy, coaxingly, "I thought you liked helping with preening?"

Indeed he did…. or used to. Helping the birds of Ponyville with their pin-feathers, after the moult, used to soothe him. Something in the obsessive, repetitive, mindless fastidiousness of the task helped to take his mind off things - carefully searching through the dense plumage for developing feathers, and stripping the waxy coating off so they could unfurl. It scratched some kind of itch, for him as much as for the grateful birds. But the little pleasures had no power to move him now.

Angel frowned and crossed his arms, not interested in helping. Not today. But Fluttershy gave him a low-power Stare and he sat, viciously angry, on the stool while the next patient took its place in front of him. Fluttershy had been increasingly impatient with Angel recently, though she tried hard to hide it. They'd never quite made up after he'd bitten her, but had settled into an uneasy and fractious coexistence. Time after time, Angel had longed to apologise, to make things right, but these days he lived in a constant red fog of undirected rage which was superimposed on the background grey deadness he'd grown accustomed to.

Fluttershy, too, had changed, her thick walls of patience finally showing signs of erosion. Unusual for her, she'd occasionally stooped to take part in his petty viciousness, his little passive-aggressive actions. Angel caught himself watching her cautiously out of the corner of his eye, as he often did these days. He thought she was acting strange, suspicious. Not like herself.

And he couldn't get the image of her burning, green-eyed face out of his mind.

A squawk of pain jolted Angel back to the present. He felt the instinctive and irresistible startlement which only a true cry of alarm can cause, cutting through all preoccupation and abstraction and forcing attention to the here-and-now even before he realised what was happening. Under his paws, the small parrot looked at him reproachfully, trying to get away. Angel lifted a paw and saw a tiny patch of bright red. Blood. He'd burst a blood-feather by mistake.

Blood-feathers were not ready to have their coating removed; they still, as the name implied, had a blood supply. Angel watched as a tiny dark spot began to grow within the bright green plumage. The parrot probably didn't know exactly what had happened, only that there had been a sharp but fleeting pain. In absolute terms, there wasn't a lot of blood, not yet - but birds didn't have a lot of blood to begin with, and were very sensitive to shock.

In other words, the parrot would be dead in mere minutes. Angel couldn't bring himself to care.

He sat there, watching as the parrot fussed and tried to reach around to preen the injured spot, still unaware that it was bleeding. It couldn’t reach. The tiny dark speck was slowly expanding, soaking the colourful feathers to a patch of almost black. Angel just watched, saying nothing, doing nothing.

Fluttershy saw. It was chance that she looked up from her own patient, chance that she saw the dark wetness on the parrot - or maybe suspicion. Perhaps she'd been checking on Angel's work this whole time. She let out a cry of dismay and rushed over, firmly restraining the parrot while she plucked out the burst blood-feather with her teeth and held the corner of her hoof over the little raised bump which resulted. The bleeding would stop, now that the whole feather had been removed. She soothed the alarmed little parrot, but Angel could see the fury and hatred in her eyes when she looked at him. He remembered that look well. Uncomprehending revulsion, the turmoil of a loathing all the stronger for having driven out a genuine love. It had been his father's constant expression after Angel killed the changeling which had replaced his mother.

Angel looked at his paws, and saw the blood. Yes, it was just like before. His vision began to blur and sway. He felt detached from everything, like it was a dream. Fluttershy was still staring at him in horror and disgust, her eyes expressing what she could not find words for. Angel perceived everything as from a great distance as Fluttershy rose, body language tense, and came for him. She was saying something, terse, words cutting like knives even though he couldn't be sure of what he heard, through the fog of dissociation. Things his mother used to say. That he was bad. Evil. Worthless. Harmful. Vermin. Unwelcome and undeserving. That she wished she'd never had him. He cowered, risking another look into Fluttershy's eyes. It was just like his nightmare. As she approached with teeth clenched and lips curled in a snarl, they flashed green.

Angel fled.