Fluttershy always enjoyed market days at Ponyville. The crowds were just big enough to test her fears and help her grow as a pony, but not so big that she would rather curl up in a ball and cry herself to sleep. Everything that she couldn’t grow herself, she got from here. Without market days, Fluttershy would have to track down every vendor on their own, and she always felt like an intruder if she approached them at their place of work.

The pegasus’s saddlebags were already bulging with various kinds of animal feed, and she had many more purchases left to make before the day was done. “Oh dear,” she whispered to herself, not wishing to disturb the other market-goers with her rambling. “What if I can’t fit it all? Well, I can’t have that, the animals need their food. Maybe I could go and get more bags?” Fluttershy turned to make her way back to her cottage, then stopped dead after only a few tiny steps.

“But how long will that take? Will the market still be open when I get back? And will I still be able to get everything? Oh dear, oh dear, oh...”

“Hiya, Fluttershy!” The sudden voice from behind was terribly startling to the yellow pegasus, who dropped her saddlebags and took off at a speed that would make Rainbow Dash green with envy. For about five inches, and then her tail pulled taut.

“Please, no! Take everything I have, just please don’t hurt me!” Fluttershy curled up into the fetal position, and lay there trembling for a good twenty seconds. When she heard a familiar giggling, the pegasus dared to open her eyes and survey the situation.

“Hiya, Fluttershy! Glad I caught you! I have something really important to tell you!” It was Pinkie Pie, her voice slightly muffled by a mouthful of Fluttershy’s tail. The pegasus sighed, and gave her tail a timid tug. Pinkie spat it out, then smiled and bounced around a little.

“What is it, Pinkie? I have a lot of shopping to do.” To demonstrate, Fluttershy picked up her saddlebags, dusted them off, and slung them across her back.

“But that’s just it!” The pink pony produced a plethora of pouches and parcels packed with precious... groceries. In a move that would normally be impossible, Pinkie stuffed bag after bag into Fluttershy’s already bloated bags, all the while rattling off what was in each parcel.

“This one’s got fish feed, this one’s got a knife sharpener, that one’s got a few rare steaks don’ttellanyoneyouhavethisit’stotallyillegal, and this is a book on yoga for chickens!” Pinkie stepped back and beamed, while Fluttershy just stood there.

She was dumbfounded, as much by the lack of added weight as by her friend’s comprehensive knowledge of everything on her shopping list. “How did you..?”

“It’s the third Sunday of January, and only a week after the teddy bears had their picnic! How much more obvious could it be?” Unusually for Pinkie Pie, she began pulling charts and graphs out of thin air. Some of them, Fluttershy noticed, bore Twilight Sparkle’s distinct hornwriting. “But enough about you, let’s talk about us!”

“Us?” Fluttershy was a little concerned. With her shopping finished, it was imperative that she get back to her cottage and unpack as soon as possible. She didn’t even want to think about what kind of headache Pinkie’s reality-defying bags would induce as she unpacked them.

“Of course us!” Without so much as a by-your-leave, Pinkie picked Fluttershy up and carried her through the streets. “I just discovered a new flavor of cupcake, and I need the opinion of a pony with a unique taste!”

The unusual pair drew a few confused glances as Pinkie wove in and out of the crowds, but ponies mostly turned away once they saw who it was. It was just Pinkie Pie, they reasoned. Not even super extra Pinkie Pie. Nothing to get worked up over, hardly even worth noticing.

Eventually, Fluttershy’s hooves touched ground just outside of Sugarcube Corner. Pinkie Pie smiled and vanished, though the sudden swinging of the door suggested that she was merely moving faster than the naked eye could follow. Fluttershy really hated it when she did that.

“Come on, Fluttershy! We’ve got cupcakes to taste!” Pinkie’s head poked out through the door for only a fraction of a second, but it was enough to make Fluttershy jump with fright. She was more than a little hesitant to follow the baker, and her thoughts turned once again to her shopping. Still, she thought, what could a few little cupcakes hurt?

~

The cupcakes looked delicious, there could be no doubting that. They were a dark chocolate color, with a truly humongous amount of rainbow icing on each one. Pinkie carefully selected two cupcakes from the cooling rack, setting them down on two beautifully decorated plates. Just as Fluttershy was about to choose which plate she wanted, Pinkie suddenly grabbed the entire cooling rack and slammed it down in front of her guest.

“Isn’t that a bit much?” Fluttershy asked, eyeing the rows and rows of cupcakes as one might eye a stack of homework.

“Don’t be silly, Fluttershy! This is a taste test, not a tea party!” Without further ado, Pinkie Pie dove into the mountain of desserts, slurping and slobbering as she shovelled cupcake after cupcake into her mouth.

Fluttershy was not so enthusiastic in her taste testing. She selected a cupcake at random, snatching it away before the pink pony’s broad sweeps left her with nothing. At first, Fluttershy only nibbled on the thick frosting. There seemed to be an infinite number of flavors wrapped up in the frosting, so much so that the pegasus was worried that her taste buds might explode. Thusly tantalized, Fluttershy took her first tentative bite of the pastry.

“So, what do you think?” Pinkie sprang from the pile of pastries, her face covered in crumbs. “Is it delicious? Super amazing? Superbly amazing in its deliciousness?”

“It’s certainly... different,” Fluttershy mused as she chewed. There was something foreign in the texture of the pastry, something that the pegasus was entirely unfamiliar with. No matter how she wondered and pondered, Fluttershy could not place the strange ingredient. “So, what do you call this new flavor?”

“I don’t really know what to call it,” Pinkie Pie confessed, chuckling. “Actually, I was hoping you could help me come up with a catchy name.”

“Oh, I’m not very good with marketing. Besides, I don’t even know what’s in these.” Fluttershy held up what was left of her cupcake to illustrate her point. “Is there some kind of secret ingredient?”

“There sure is!” Pinkie looked from side to side, as though scanning the empty room for intruders and eavesdroppers. Then she leaned across the table, bringing her face as close to Fluttershy as possible, before whispering excitedly.

“The secret ingredient is... ponies!”

“What do you mean?” Fluttershy was very confused, and was certain that she had heard wrong.

“I chopped up a pony and baked them into cupcakes!” There was a wide smile on the pink pony’s face, which in any other circumstance would have been dismissed as plain old Pinkie Pie. In this time and place, though, the giddy grin was horribly unnerving, as though she saw nothing wrong with what she had just said.

There were no words in Fluttershy’s mouth, nothing she could say to that. The poor pegasus’s stomach churned and tumbled as she looked at the cupcake, at the size of the bite, and then at the... she could only describe it as the graveyard that was Pinkie’s share of the cupcakes. At a loss for words, Fluttershy turned away from the table and threw up.

“How... how could you?” The words were barely audible, being mumbled in a terrified whisper.

“Oh, you know. I just stumbled across this old recipe in a locked box in the basement of some abandoned shack in the middle of the Everfree Forest. Seriously, isn’t that just screaming to be tried out?” Pinkie Pie was far too close to Fluttershy’s face for comfort, and her chin hovered just above the puddle of vomit.

“But... where did you get...” The word was difficult to say, both for being unfamiliar to the pony vocabulary, and for being such a gruesome one for Futtershy to use, “...meat?”

“Somepony moved out of Ponyville, silly!” Pinkie Pie hauled the paralyzed pegasus to her hooves, and started to nudge her in the direction of the kitchen. “Nopony will ask where somepony is if they already know that somepony isn’t here!”

They entered the kitchen, and Fluttershy looked around, expecting to see blood and innards on every surface. But the Cakes’ kitchen was as immaculate as ever, with nary even a butcher’s knife in sight. The imperiled pegasus began to relax, and it was at that precise moment that Pinkie Pie pulled a concealed lever in the corner.

The floor gave way under Fluttershy’s feet, and she tumbled down a long flight of stairs. When she at last reached the bottom, her wings were bent a little out of shape, though none the worse for wear. Fluttershy looked up to the top, and squeaked in panic when she saw Pinkie Pie trotting leisurely down the steps.

She sprang away from the stairs, running deeper into the dark cellar in search of a place to hide. Eventually, Fluttershy stopped blindly panicking, and slowly backed away from what little she could see of the light. Pinkie Pie’s shadow stood out, but it was indistinct and far away.

“Where are you, Fluttershy?” The pink pony sounded no different down here than she did in her ‘normal’, everyday life. “This will take forever if you keep hiding from me!”

“That’s the idea,” Fluttershy couldn’t help but whisper to herself. As she backed further away from the psychotic killer, one of the pegasus’s hooves knocked against what felt like a wooden table leg. The tiny sound, though not enough to alert Pinkie Pie, was enough to alert somepony else.

“You’re not... pink... are you?” The voice was little more than a wheeze, and Fluttershy flashed back to a certain visit to the hospital. Here, in the choking dark, there was nothing to be seen, but Fluttershy could feel that somepony was close.

“I’m Fluttershy,” she whispered, feeling tentatively around her surroundings. There was a table, and her hoof brushed up against something soft and yielding to the touch. There was a small gasp of pain from right beside her, and Fluttershy withdrew her hoof immediately. Something brushed against her ear, and the pegasus felt the weak nuzzling of another pony’s snout.

“Kindness,” the wheeze came again, like a faint breeze on Fluttershy’s cheek. “Killing... would be a... kindness...”

Fluttershy remembered a slew of forest animals, more than she wished she could remember, who had needed what she called ‘the cruellest kindness’. Though she could not see the pony’s plight, there was an unmistakable pleading in every ragged breath. Fluttershy started to feel around for something sharp.

“Oh, there you are!” The basement suddenly exploded with light, and Fluttershy was almost struck blind by the illumination. When the blurs faded, she had to fight back the urge to vomit again.

There was rack upon rack of instrument before her, and none of the musical variety. A plentiful plethora of knives, saws and other sharp edges gleamed at Fluttershy, painstakingly sharpened and meticulously polished. Behind her, there lay a pegasus, laid out on a big wooden table. Her wings hung limp at her sides, and her head was turned to face Fluttershy. The face from which her pleading eyes stared out at Fluttershy was a veritable patchwork of exposed muscle and baggy, malnourished blue skin, much like the rest of her body.

“Oh, so you’ve found my latest contributor! Anypony you know?” Pinkie Pie slid up right alongside Fluttershy, a hoof slung nonchalantly over the traumatized pegasus’s shoulders.

Fluttershy looked into those eyes, filled with hopeless desperation, and could only shake her head. She had seen the face a million times, but never up close. She was one of many, many ponies that Fluttershy had never taken the time to meet, had never had the courage to approach. There was no name attached to the face in Fluttershy’s mind.

But this did nothing to diminish her horror and sadness at what was being done, and the tears flowed all the more freely as Fluttershy realized how heartless she must seem.

“Don’t worry about her, though.” Pinkie broke contact with Fluttershy, and a widening in the victim’s eyes alerted the yellow pegasus to a growing danger. “She’s not going to be your problem for much longer.”

Fluttershy rounded on her former friend, and was horrified at what she saw. Pinkie had selected a kitchen knife, truly unspectacular in how plain it was, but Fluttershy would have been hard pressed to name anything that had ever seemed more frightening.

“Wait, no!” Fluttershy cowered under the table, shivering and shaking as Pinkie made a wild lunge at where she had been not moments ago. “You can’t do this!”

“But imagine how bad this will be for business!” Pinkie shouted back, sounding a little concerned for the first time that day. “If ponies found out that I was cutting up ponies under Sugarcube Corner, the Cakes would go out of business! They would lose their business, and Pound and Pumpkin would have nowhere to live!” The knife swung under the table, coming dangerously close to Fluttershy.

“But you need me!” Fluttershy made a last, desperate plea. To her surprise, the next thing she felt was not a slash to the face, but the poke of a hoof.

“Why would I need you?” Pinkie sounded genuinely confused, as well as mildly interested. Fluttershy’s mind raced to justify her plea, if only to buy more time.

“Well, eventually, ponies will want to know what’s in your new cupcakes. You can’t hide the truth forever, and when it comes out you’ll be carted off to Tartarus. But there’s another market for your,” she almost gagged at the words, “meat cupcakes.”

“Go on.” The knife fell to the floor, and Pinkie had sunk down to Fluttershy’s level. Her ears were perked up, and her undivided attention was in Fluttershy’s hooves.

“Animals can’t normally eat your sweet desserts, because it’s so bad for them. But if you tweak this new recipe a little bit, then every carnivore in Equestria will want a piece of Pinkie Pie! Figuratively speaking, I mean.”

Pinkie Pie looked to be deep in thought. Fluttershy tensed for flight, and a tiny part of her brain wondered if it would be worth trying to rescue the victim on top of the table. It was a very tiny voice in her head, though, and necessity won out over desire in the pegasus’s mind. If she had to run, it would be alone.

“Deal.”

“What?” Fluttershy was surprised. She hadn’t expected Pinkie to actually give two bits about what was being said.

“I said deal. Sounds like a great way to drum up some extra business, make a name for myself. Mommy and Daddy will be so happy!” Pinkie pulled Fluttershy out from under the table, and started earnestly shaking her hoof. “And if I kill you, who will there be to coordinate? I can’t just walk up to a bear and pitch him my cupcakes! I need an insider!” Pinkie grabbed Fluttershy by the neck, and pointed her towards the ceiling.

“Picture it, Flutters. Ponycakes, Incorporated! This could be a real step up for me!” The murderer gave her friend a great, big hug, and there were tears of joy in her eyes as Fluttershy pulled away.

“Great, great,” Fluttershy mumbled, wondering if she had only escaped the frying pan, but not the fire. “So, does this one need to be alive right now?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Well, I didn’t know if there was going to any real demand for supply, so I just kept her around. But I can harvest her real quick, if the squirming is bothering you.”

Fluttershy met the eyes of the tortured pegasus, who gave a weak, almost imperceptible nod. “Give me a knife.”

Pinkie Pie was more than happy to oblige, and Fluttershy advanced slowly. There was a strange smile on the face of her victim as the knife’s edge drew close, and when the incision was made, two words were gasped by the one on the table.

“Thank you.”

~

When Fluttershy got home later that day, she took a long, cold shower. Even after hours and hours of scrubbing, she still felt dirty. Unable to scrub any longer, for fear that she might draw blood, Fluttershy left the bathroom and started to unpack her groceries. The physics-defying bags proved just as much of a challenge as expected, and soon the sun was setting.

Fluttershy went to sleep, wondering if she could run the risk of telling anypony about Pinkie. How many more ponies would be hurt if she didn’t stand up? How many would be hurt if she did? What was the right thing to do?

When she woke up the next morning, she knew what she had to do. There were some ponies that needed a good, hard talking to.

Author's Note

Uploading in middle of night, tell me if I messed up.