Where All My Layers Can Become Reeds
(Sorry if I Smothered You.)
Fluttershy had a special place she liked to go to whenever she had the time to visit the ground: a small grove cut like a perfect circle in an overgrowth of thick ivies and mosses, shrouded by a quick spotting of twisting lavender flowers that smelled like the perfume her classmates would spray on their necks -- she had tried to rub them on her skin to transfer the lovely aroma over once before, but that had only smeared trails of purple over the veins along her throat and left a rash over for days to come.
(It looked like hickeys to them. The ones that didn't call her names and make comments about her "long nights" ran away coughing from the strong smell.)
That experience had soured her impression of the grove only a little, and whenever she happened to drop down to stop at its center, she was left blown away and enraptured by its peaceful quiet and lavish plant life one couldn't find in the clouds. Small animals would sometimes scamper across the forest and cut a swath through the grove in lines, and Fluttershy loved those times as she got to see how they picked apart the roots of flowers for consumption. She dared not get close, as to not disturb them as they ate, and instead took to looking on from afar with a smile.
(Her cousin Bumblefree ate like no other pony on the planet, and once she had tried to take notes of his eating habits as compared to the animals. He had cried, and Fluttershy could still taste the dirt from her kitchen floor. She didn't want the animals to cry too so eventually she hid so she wouldn't be a bother at all.)
(Fluttershy didn't like being a bother.)
There was also the tranquility of the sound of the blubbering river snaking its way through the forest, sucking away at the banks of dirt and rocks and casting them away into its deceivingly calm and innocent-appearing shooting currents. When Fluttershy took a rather nasty fall at flight camp which left her wing in a twist, or was accidentally tripped by Gilda and rolled down the steps, she went to the river to gently scoop water to her bruise and to wash the hot salt from her cheeks. Her reflections waver captured her eyes most times on these visits, the animals disappearing to nothing but distant chirps so far away, and she looked at the sun reflecting from the water which cascaded a picture of her over the brisk, tiny waves.
She looked at her thinned, salty face, and her skinny body and long legs which left her unsteady and wobbling as she walked -- and her wings, two ugly slabs of yellow-feathered meat that couldn't get her off the ground well, and made it take hours to get home from the ground. It was on these days that she stayed for hours, till the sun dipped below the horizon and sent her wavering face behind red shadows. Only when it disappeared completely, dusky shadows obscuring her reflection to nothing but a shadow which twisted foggily over the ground at her side, did she leave.
(Once, Rainbow Dash found her when she was holding her hoof over the river. Fluttershy was just curious about what it would be like to feel like an actual rock, since the other pegasi said she was like one already, but Rainbow was worried.)
(Fluttershy apologized for being out to the middle of the night. She didn't want Rainbow or the others to worry. She apologized for bothering Rainbow too, since she came all the way down to the ground just for something silly.)
The grove also split off, Fluttershy once found, to a flattened area of golden and vibrantly popping green grass dotted with trees. Cows and pigs, creatures she'd only seen in books, grazed idly there, as well as a few species of small bird, and the small filly would gently speak with them and offer them foods and plants from within the forest which the other animals had deemed safe. She gained a lot of critter friends on her trips there, with every imprint into the rich, muddy earth bringing up worms to bring flocks of all sorts of creatures to her lap, and at times a docile bear would be seen poking through some sparse shrubbery just to gallop out from hiding and tackle the splintered bark of a tree until its red bounties of apples fell out.
Fluttershy visited that place for far longer than the others, laying out in the sun enveloped in a sweet pile of fur and paws which hugged and loved at her thin legs and rounded face and even the feathered arms at her withers. It was nice, for a while.
Then one day an old stallion came and yelled at her. Fluttershy was scared, but managed to stammer out a small offer of an apple, as the adults had taught her to do. That only lent to the stallion screaming more, saying that she was destroying his livelihood and tearing up the soil which had grown him.
He just kept yelling, and Fluttershy didn't know what to do, especially when a nice dog became not nice, and things went so, so...
(Wrong. They went wrong. So wrong. And Fluttershy ran away and never looked back and sobbed into the water and thought about acting like her head was a heavy, sinkable rock.)
Even after the old stallion stopped patrolling the fields for her presence, bright summer days sweetly cascading over the fields, Fluttershy dared not touch the place in the light of day. Once the sun dropped from its place into the silver that was night, that was when she sneaked in after hours of reflection-gazing.
She would lay down, alone in the grass and stare at the darkness enshrouding her, roll herself in it like a blanket that obscured her bruises from camp. Smear her hooves into the grasses and stain at her coat with the scents of nature, the smells which would reek at her mane and linger there whenever she needed to bury her face inside it to hide. The animals never came to her these nights, just stayed far away and watched as she kissed the muddy ground, cried hotly to the dirt. Told the earth about how the clouds that Gilda pushed her down on were full of rain and dirt from ponies' hooves.
Fluttershy never went home after that. She would lay and lay, staring to the mud and the strong bark of the trees, and she would feel the heartbeat of the ground and the beauty in it until Rainbow came for her. She would look down, deep down, where the roots of the apple trees were linked together in harmony, where the mix of chemicals and magic in them breathed without a voice. She would scatter the seeds from rotten apples that had fell, dig them holes and bury them, and give her animal friends the fruits' corpses to snack on and fill their bellies.
And she would look down further down to the seed which had sprouted this behemoth of a forest beside the field, starting at just one tree, and she would think about all of the animals' habitats that were made by just it. And she would think that maybe,
(She was just trying to make herself more presentable, but instead she bothered the foals at camp with that smell; they were probably allergic and she caused them to flare up!)
(She always made Bumblefree cry.)
(She tried to be a good friend to Rainbow Dash, but she always made her worry and worry with her silly ideas.)
(She tried to help the animals but completely ignored that stallion's work, and made even a little animal friend angry.)
(Fluttershy was always a bother.)
just maybe, she liked being on the ground because she belonged there,
(Maybe she belonged under it.)
and she thought of what it would be like to be a tree. She would like to be a tree.
(Because then she would be giving breath instead of smothering it out of everypony.)
