Oh dear. It happened again.
I couldn't sleep. It was the middle of fall, and I couldn't sleep. Normally, at this time of year, I should be snuggled all cozy under the covers, in my bedroom, in my nice warm cottage, maybe kept warm by a furry friend or two. But tonight, I was tossing and turning from the heat. It was so hot I couldn't bear it. I even opened a window to let in a chilly breeze, but the moonlight...
Even the moonlight felt too warm on me.
I knew what was happening. I knew it was coming several nights ago. I tried to ignore it, the same way I tired to ignore it the other times, but in the end, I never could ignore it for long.
I was hungry again, but not the regular kind of hungry you get when you wake up in the middle of the night. I had that terrible, awful kind of Hunger, the one that compels me to get up in the night and do something about it – even something terrible.
The Hunger I've had for months now.
I resigned myself to getting up, and quietly trotted downstairs. I tried to keep quiet as I walked through the living room out of habit, but I know all the animals are awake. They can sense it. They know something's happening to me, even if they don't know what, and it makes them uneasy. I could see them cowering in their beds and perches and little homes. I hate seeing them this way. I hate scaring them so, but I can't help it.
It's the Hunger that's driving me now.
As I passed by the mirror on the way to the front door of my cottage, I looked down at the floor. I hate to take a look at myself when I get like this, but some morbid curiosity had the better of me. With my head still down, I trotted in front of the mirror, took a deep breath, and raised my head, my eyes still shut tight. After another deep breath to try and calm myself, I snapped them open and looked at my reflection.
I could see the Hunger taking hold of me. I could see it in my own eyes, terrible and frightening. My eyes changed when I had to eat, every time it happened. My eyes had turned red. They were red like the last light of a dying sunset. They were red like freshly spilled blood.
They were red like an apple.
I squeezed my eyes shut and looked away almost as fast as I had looked up. I couldn't stand the sight of me, of what I had become, but I knew what had to be done to keep it at bay another few weeks. Quietly, I opened the door and stepped out into the chilly breeze under the burning moon.
I used to be so afraid of the dark outside my cottage at night, but not any more. Not now when I could see almost as though it were day, like I was meant to be out at this hour. I walked slowly from my home, along the path, taking the winding dirt trail that led around the very outskirts of Ponyville, where only a few farms and houses broke the landscape. Each step I took carefully, quietly, trying not to draw attention to myself, but each one leading me with a sense of urgency towards my destination.
During the long walk, the same thoughts rushed through my head. How did this happen to me? Why do I still feel this compulsion, this unending Hunger? What part of Twilight's spell didn't get fully removed from me? What would my friends think of me if they knew?
Would I be like this forever?
At first, it seemed so normal. I hardly thought anything of it. After all, I always bought things from Applejack's cart in the market, like her pies and her fritters. I'd pass her by in the morning as she was setting up, stop to say hello and ask how she was, and buy an apple. Then in the afternoon, when I needed a snack, I started buying another apple. In the evening, just before she left for home, I'd buy a saddlebag of apples for my pantry.
Except, those apples never made it to my pantry. Sometimes, they didn't even make it home before I ate them all.
I hadn't even noticed it myself until Applejack said something. She said I'd become her best customer. I asked her what she meant, and she said I'd bought nearly two bushels of apples in just a month. I couldn't believe it. I would never have eaten that many.
But I had, and it took Applejack to point it out to me. There was no arguing with her on that point. Applejack would never lie to me about such a thing.
After that, I tried to slow down. I stopped going to the market just for an apple. I tried not to even think of my friend's orchard just down the road. Besides, I couldn't let her or anypony else think there was something wrong with me. I couldn't help myself though. I wanted, no, needed those apples.
I spent so many bits on train tickets to Canterlot, buying apples that probably came from Sweet Apple Acres anyway, at a higher price, just to keep anypony else from knowing what I was doing. To keep them from knowing what I was becoming. To keep them from knowing I had eaten more apples in six weeks than I had the rest of my whole life, and was bingeing on them the whole train ride home.
But it wasn't enough. That's when the Hunger first took hold of me, when I first got up in the middle of the night and followed the insidious siren call of the orchard, snuck into Applejack's fields under the cover of darkness, and sucked dry as many apples as I could before the sun came up again and my friends found what had happened to all their hard work.
I felt so guilty. I still feel guilty. I risked exposing what I had become, stopped going to Canterlot to buy apples, and went back to getting them from Applejack's cart in the market. I tried to give Applejack more money, to try and make up for what I'd stolen, even a little, but she wouldn't let me. In fact, she tried to give me a discount on them because I'd bought so many from her already.
I don't think I'd ever seen Applejack look so surprised at me as when I demanded to pay full price for my apples. She must have thought I was losing my mind, but in the end, she accepted it. She must have thought that was my way of being honest with her, and she of all ponies certainly couldn't argue with that.
But no matter how many apples I ate, the Hunger kept coming back, every few weeks, almost like clockwork, and I would end up being drawn to the trees once again, just like tonight.
I fluttered quietly over the fence around Applejack's orchard and stalked up to one of the trees still laden with fruit. I cast a nervous glance down the rows of trees towards the farm house, but all the lights were still out, thank goodness. If I was ever caught here, I don't know what I'd do. I flew up into the branches, hiding myself in the leaves, trying to keep the trunk between me and the house so I couldn't be seen. Once again I'd been so caught up in thinking only about the apples that I didn't think to wear something dark, something that would hide me better in the trees. Yellow and pink aren't exactly good camouflage, but now that I was so close, and could see the apples hanging there just in front of me, nothing else mattered.
It took me a while to realize why, even with all the apples I ate, the Hunger kept coming back over and over again. Why I had to come to the trees in the middle of the night. I didn't want to believe it at first, but I couldn't deny it, or what I was really after, what I really Hungered for.
Some plants, like trees, grow so slowly it's easy to forget they are living things, but they are. They breathe, they eat, they drink. Everything that makes a pony a living thing, plants do as well, and when they thrive, they produce things like apples. Applejack's apples are the very best, fresh and ripe and juicy, but as soon as they've been picked, been separated from their mother tree, they're no longer a living thing.
These apples, hanging from the tree by their umbilical stem, nourished by the tree as a mother does to her infant, were still alive. That was what I Hungered for. I needed apples that were still living in order to satisfy me.
I needed to be the one to kill them.
I lunged at the nearest apple, sank my fangs, those awful, scary fangs that never went away, deep into its flesh and drank, drank until all that was left was a mushy pulp in the shell of an apple's red skin, but that didn't sate me. One is never enough. One wouldn't even come close when I had tried to suppress the Hunger for so many nights. I took another, then another, leaping from branch to branch, leaving cadavers in my wake, not caring that my wild thrashing and biting and feeding was waking the poor birds in the nearby trees, making them flee their nests in a noisy fright.
Not caring until I heard Applejack's voice from the farmhouse calling out, “Is anypony out there?”
I turned so quick I nearly fell out of the tree, and saw Applejack's lantern bobbing up and down as she walked through the rows. My heart leapt into my throat. I had never been so scared, not even when I had performed on a stage in front of hundreds of ponies, competed in front of thousands, as I was at the thought of just this one other pony, this one friend, catching sight of me now.
I put my back to the tree, trying to hide as I looked for my next move, and in desperation I leapt, flying to the next tree over, staying level with the leafy canopy of the trees to obscure me. I then jumped to another, and then another, each one another row over, trying to stay ahead of Applejack's lantern light before she could get a good look at me, hearing her call, “Who's out there?”
Finally, I reached the edge of the orchard. I jumped high into the air, flying with all my might away from Sweet Apple Acres as fast as my wings could carry me, hoping to be well out of sight by the time Applejack reached her farm's back fence.
I opened the door to my cottage and dashed inside as fast as I could, locking the door behind me, panting hard, my heart pounding in my chest as I slumped against the door, shivering from the cold night air and the chill in my home. For a while I couldn't move, paralysed by the fear that Applejack may have seen me flying away from her farm. She'd come to see me, no doubt, when she found out what had happened. She'd ask me to tell the vampire fruit bats to stay in their preserve again, and I would, but they'd all look back at me, knowingly, glaring at me angrily for pinning the blame on them again.
Maybe, this time, Applejack would come to find out why I had done what I'd done, and I'd have no idea what to tell her.
Gradually, after I had stopped shaking as much, I pulled myself back up to my hooves, walking slowly back into my living room, seeing all my animal friends begin to peek out at me, looking as relieved as I felt to be here. I passed by the mirror, seeing the bottom of its frame as I walked with my head down. Taking a deep breath, I raised my head to it, my eyes still closed, until I was brave enough to snap them open and look at myself again.
My eyes were blue, like the calm surface of the ocean after the stormiest night.
With a slight smile, I walked away from the mirror and climbed the steps back up to my bedroom, where my cozy warm bed looked so inviting. I was exhausted, I always was after the Hunger took over, but this time even more so. I'd had to flee as fast as I could, before I had felt like I'd had enough.
The Hunger would be back, maybe sooner than this time.
I crawled into bed and pulled the covers up around my neck like a protective shell. It had been a lovely Autumn night, perfect for striking at the trees under the moonlight, but it would not last. Soon the seasons would change. Applejack's orchard had many different varieties of apple trees, some of which bore fruit well into the Winter, but the day would come when there would be no more apples on the trees at all.
What was I going to do then? What would happen if I couldn't give the Hunger what it wanted, what I needed?
What was I going to have to kill then?
Oh, dear.
Author's Note
Well, if they're going to show Fluttershy still has fangs at the end of that episode, how could I not do a vampire story with her?