The Bunny and the Bat
Moonshine spills from the window and wraps the room in an eerie glow. Furniture that by daylight looks just normal appear now distorted, nightmarish, and even hostile. Shadows lurk in every corner, they stain the walls and the floor of the small house, every room of it. It’s quiet, so quiet that even the faint wind outside sounds more like ghastly howl than a harmless breeze. Even though the summer is in its prime, the air feels cold, stagnant, and thin. It’s like the air one usually finds in tombs and not in the living rooms of ponies.
Angel the bunny scans the room with his eyes, searching for signs of movement, for life. None is present, but he can feel something stalking the darkness inside the house. Something he hasn’t encountered before. Something that shouldn’t exist. He smelled it when Fluttershy came home earlier that day, smelled the foreign scent that entered in as she did. Did the thing follow his owner? Did it seek to harm her, or worse, him? Angel doesn’t know, and what a rabbit doesn't know he doesn’t trust, either. So he waits in the darkness, and watches the shadows ripple.
One of them is indeed moving, quivering, growing. It rises from the corner like a cloud, like mist, and Angel presses himself deeper inside the cupboard. He doesn’t dare to close the door, though, as he doesn’t have the courage to rip his eyes away from the thing that moves in the living room. Silent as a cat, the dark figure floats around the place, and for the horror of the small white bunny, it whispers: “Angel? Where are you?”
The white rabbit shake in his hide, and pulls his huge ears over his eyes in an instinct driven attempt to make himself invisible. In his self-imposed blindness he fails to notice that the shadow is sniffing the air, and slowly turns its head towards the very cupboard he is hiding in. In the most careful fashion, the figure begins to approach the piece of furniture. Some part of Angle’s brain screams at him that it’s too quiet out there, that something bad is about to happen, but the terror has paralysed him completely.
The doors fly open along with Angle’s wide eyes. “Angel!” shouts the figure, and reaches for him. But the white bunny dodges right before the limbs get a hold of him, and he springs under the flying shadow. “No, come back!” it shouts. Angel flees over the living room mattress, and under the couch. For a moment it’s quiet, but then a face appears one side of the couch. “It’s me, Fluttershy!” says the figure. Angel doesn’t believe it for a second. Fluttershy's eyes are teal as the sky, not vermilion. His flight takes him into opposite direction of the face that immediately disappears again.
The figure flies after him into the kitchen, where it shields itself against a flying object aimed for it’s head. “Oww, Angel! Stop throwing garlic at me!” A few more onions fly towards the creature, but it deflects them with its wings. The thing makes a deep sigh. “You leave me no choice, Angel.” As the bunny prepares to throw another beet at his assailant, his body freezes in mid-throw. His eyes have met with the creature’s, and he finds himself lost in them. The onion falls lazily down on the floor, and his body relaxes.
“That’s better. Will you now listen to me?” Angel only nods. The creature flies closer him, and the moonlight shining through the window reveals the dark figure for the white rabbit. His jaw drops like the onion did.
It’s… kind of like his owner Fluttershy, but not quite. Not at all, when one sees the fangs that gleam in the silvery light. Her wings are longer, and somehow more… leathery. Their tips end in sharp looking talons instead of soft feathers. The most striking difference are the eyes, though. Their vermilion stands in stark contrast to the soft teal of Angel’s owner. The pink bats that have replaced the butterflies of her cutie mark also mark a rather crucial difference.
Fluttershy, or the creature that has perhaps dressed itself in Fluttershy’s skinned coat, seems to feel Angel’s mixed reaction, and she bites her lip anxiously. “Oh, Angel… How can I assure you that it’s still me? If I only could…” She lands on the floor in front of the bunny, and closes her eyes in concentration. Her brow wrinkles and her wings fold, and the Angel feels the trance of the Stare evaporating. But he doesn’t flee, doesn't feel that terrorized anymore. Instead, a curious expression masks him as he follows the strange creature fight some kind of a battle in her own mind. And it seems that it’s resulting to something.
Her wings change, along with her ears and whole appearance. The transformation happens slowly, becomes entangled, but finally reaches a point when the bunny can for certainty say that it really is his owner that opens her eyes to him, those teal kind eyes he loves so much. The bunny makes his happiness know by jumping against Fluttershy's neck, and wrapping himself around her delicate coat. “See? It was me, after all… That’s a good bunny. Who's a good bunny? You’re a good bunny…” The two cuddle for a moment longer, and then she sets him on the floor.
Fluttershy smiles, but her joy is shadowed by the nasty feeling that her changed condition has stirred in her heart. “I suppose you have to get used to that other Fluttershy, too,” she says to the bunny that hugs her leg now. “At least during nights you have to…” She walks over to a mirror that she keeps in a corner of her living room, and checks that all of the traces of the bat within her have disappeared. She studies her wings, her hooves, her ears, and even her cutie mark. All normal, it would seem. Finally, she cringes and opens her mouth, and sighs in relief when no fangs are visible. Then she looks deep into the mirror and sees that her right eye is still vermilion red. She blinks, and then it’s gone. Still, a shudder travels through her.
During the next day, she throws away all the fruits she has in the house.
