Throughout the day Fluttershy's condition was absolutely woeful.  Everything about her chores seemed to take three times the effort that it ought to have, and she wanted nothing other than to just fall asleep.  Her duties always kept her from napping, of course, since most of the cushions, couches, beds, and other furniture was either occupied by her friends or reeked of them.  She even started to notice just how musty and generally bad her home smelled, when every single other day it wouldn't have bothered her in the slightest.  She tried to find a break for herself but, as usual, simply couldn't.  Somepony, or some animal, kept bothering her.  First it was Twilight at the door to ask how things were and to borrow a book about advanced Ferret wrangling, then a trio of seals couldn't make up their mind as to whom the single beach ball belonged to and came to Fluttershy for adjudication.  She tried to meditate by the trees and promptly felt the wet splat of some inconsiderate avian on her withers, and even the quiet meadow that she frequented was crawling with distracting cicadas.  The sounds, smells, and eventually even the fading light of late afternoon all pierced Fluttershy's throbbing head, the poor pegasus spent about half the day whimpering and trying various herbal remedies for the pain.  

Very nearly drugged into a stupor, Fluttershy stumbled around her kitchen, trying to find something to eat.  She had spent so much time feeding her animals that she had completely forgotten about dinner, and her stomach decided to wait until almost nine in the evening to remind her.  Her refrigerator was usually home to more vegetables than many farming families could ever keep, but she had forgotten to restock on food for the week, so all she had to choose from was a can of sliced carrots and some vegetarian chili mix (without the chili).

Fluttershy sighed and pressed a hoof to her forehead.  "Well that's just perfect..."

The store would have to wait, but at least her stomach didn't.  She decided to drain and quickly saute the carrots in a little garlic oil, which had managed to go stale in her cupboards, and ate them by themselves.  Once finished, Fluttershy didn't even bother to clean her dishes or brush her teeth.  She just went upstairs and collapsed into her bed.  Unfortunately, the night couldn't possibly have been any worse.  Their was a light breeze outside, which ruffled her wind chimes and other various facets of her home and kept her awake.  By the time the clock struck midnight, Fluttershy lay exhausted in her bed, completely unable to find that happy divide between waking and dreaming.

"This sucks..."  The pegasus said to herself.  She buried her face in the pillow and yelled (as much as Fluttershy was known for yelling), then stood up to head into her bathroom.  Her goal was to check her face to make sure she wasn't looking sick, though the sight that greeted her in the mirror would beg to differ in that regard.  Her eyes were red and puffy, her face drooped with exhaustion, and even her mane was so disheveled that the usual heart shape it held looked more like a kidney.  She found it hard to stop herself from looking down, harder than usual at any rate, and once more spotted the little bottle of sleeping pills.

"Fluttershy, if you keep taking those you're gonna get addicted."  The face in the mirror told her.

"I know that.  It says so on the bottle."

"So don't do it then."  For some reason the reflection had more sense than she did.

"But I can't sleep..." The physical pegasus whined, clearly at her wit's end.

"Don't you think that's because you've been popping pills for three days?"

"Wait...  Why the hay am I talking to myself?"

"That's not the po--"  Fluttershy interrupted her mirror self by opening the medicine cabinet and forcing her out of view.  She had played games like that and talked with herself since she was very young, seeing as how she had so few friends, and it occasionally resurfaced in her daily life whenever the stress was bad enough.  She picked up the bottle of pills, poured two out into her hoof, and stared at them.  The pills were such a pretty shade; like the blue hue in Rarity's eyes without the depth, or Rainbow Dash's matte blue streaks in her mane.  Every so often as the light caressed them, a flash from a grain of sugar or whatever else crystalline was in the things would glimmer with a prismatic twinkle that made her smile.  

"Damn...  These things are even starting to look good..."  Fluttershy commented.  Feeling like that said more about her developing dependency than anything, she dropped one back into the bottle and swallowed the remaining pill.  She brought the bottle with her and set it next to her bed, figuring that once it was empty she could just drop the habit by lack of availability, and lay back down on her sheets.  The edge to her exhaustion didn't ever quite go away, but Fluttershy did start to feel a little drowsier, though not to the degree that she had wanted.  She still couldn't fall asleep; she was instead tormented by little sounds every which way, breaking her out of the trance that she continually approached, and making her even more frustrated.  With yet another scream into her pillow, Fluttershy checked her clock and very nearly let her jaw hit the floor.  It was 2:53 in the morning, and she still hadn't gotten a wink.

"Alright fine, you win."  She said softly to herself.  By now she had become pretty good at opening this particular foal proof cap, which came off the bottle with three more pills arranged within it, conveniently placed such that they stuck inside by their shape alone.  Fluttershy knocked the cap against her lips and dropped all three pills into her mouth, swallowed them without any water, and forcefully threw her head back down onto the pillow.  She was fast asleep by 3:00.

The world she entered wasn't a beautiful island or jungle, nor was it highland, mountain, forest or even Ponyville itself, but instead a vast, glittering ocean as deep and mysterious as she remembered it being.  Fluttershy had quite literally 'fallen' asleep, and realized that she was moving only just before she hit the water.  The spray wasn't salty, though, it was fresh, and as pure as clean spring water filtered by moss.  Fluttershy tried to swim, but felt like she just couldn't tread water, and her wings had become useless the instant her feathers were soaked.  She started to panic.  She sank and held her breath, marveling in the clarity of the water, but simultaneously spinning into a chaotic fear, one so primal that she felt it to her very core.

"Relax, Fluttershy."  A voice said.  It sounded like wind through trees, but there weren't any trees here.  "Just let go.  What are you afraid of."

Fluttershy wanted to say "drowning" but she was desperately clinging onto the remaining breath in her lungs; the one she thought would truly be her last.  She struggled and kicked, trying desperately to reach the surface, but it seemed that the glassy plane eluded her, no matter how quickly she swam upward.  Eventually, from the strain of exercise and the time she had spent squeezing her airway shut, Fluttershy was forced to exhale.  The breath of air escaped her burning lungs and bubbled to the surface, and she involuntarily inhaled to replace it.  What entered her lungs wasn't the heavy, choking sensation of water, but instead a clean breeze that refreshed her frightened mind.  

"That wasn't so bad, was it?"  Said the voice again.  This time, it had enough clarity to be recognized as the childish voice of her would-be dream companion, only he wasn't anywhere to be seen.  "Dying is just like anything you do for the first time; it's scary at first, but you look back on it and laugh eventually."

"You killed me?!"  Fluttershy screamed; her voice had an unexpected clarity to it for being submerged in water.

The voice laughed a happy, joyous laugh.  "Oh no of course not!  I had nothing to do with that, you just experienced what it's like.  The fear, the struggle, and in the end the realization that the world goes on without you, even after your efforts are all for naught.  Isn't it beautiful?"

"I don't want to die..."  Fluttershy was more scared by the apparent power that was being held over her than by the prospect of having just faced the end of her life.

"But you will, at some point in time.  Not wanting what you must have is worse than wanting what you can't have; someone else must suffer as a result."  The source of the speech revealed itself when a cluster of kelp rotated about itself and produced the green maned colt.  "Death, just like life, is a gift.  You wouldn't refuse it if you knew what good it could do you."

Fluttershy stared into his eyes as he approached her.  The green pony, eyes the color of seafoam and hair as green as the deepest ocean algae floated so naturally among the undersea currents that she could swear he was a child of the water.

"W-where are we?"  The pegasus asked with a shudder in her voice.  She was still scared, and the joviality and seeming lack of empathy from the other pony was only making her more uncomfortable, despite her impressions of him.

"Still in your dreams, Fluttershy.  We always have been and always will be.  Tonight, you dream of water.  Water that surrounds you, swallows you, and sends you forth with its mighty rush.  Water is life, Fluttershy, and death.  You cannot have a coin with only one side, or it wouldn't be worth the space it doesn't occupy."  The pony swam around Fluttershy in a circle, clearly enjoying having the ocean sweep through his mane and tail.  The ivy that was usually there had been replaced by intricately woven bands of seaweed and kelp, and diminutive fish and crustaceans followed in his wake, nibbling up the bits of edible debris that fell off of him.

"But...  What do I do?"  Fluttershy needed a way to voice her confusion.  She was utterly lost, and that too brought an even wider grin to the green pony's face.

"You can do anything you want!  But you strike me as someone who enjoys experience."  The pony said, taking Fluttershy's hooves into his own.  "Now that you've experienced death, would you like to experience life?"

Fluttershy blinked, confused, and opened her mouth to speak, but she just couldn't talk.  The ocean's waves and currents beneath the surface washed over her, and she could feel every strand of fur on her body move and sway with it.  The other pony smiled and fell backward, bringing Fluttershy along with him into the abyss below.  

"Come with me, Fluttershy~ I promise I won't hurt you."

The pegasus believed his genuine smile this time, utterly so, and went along.  She followed his body language and melted into the sea, watched his hair trail upward as their bodies moved down.  She felt as it brushed across her cheek and shoulders, caressed her lips and twined with her own mane.  The warmth of the ocean, the feeling of being submerged and of drifting away, the feeling of every eddy and current moving her was divine.  She felt the waves on the shore, up and down, forward and back, as though the earth was breathing.  The tide was coming in, she felt a swelling, growing, the waves hit faster.

Fluttershy closed her eyes and leaned back herself, falling down with the pony equally rather than being pulled, and gasped.  Her breaths, they were the waves, and to exhale felt as though she could move the shores themselves.  Her cheeks flushed, the ocean swelled around her, it touched her everywhere and she could feel it everywhere, warm, sensual, and loving.  She was still in the womb, and yet she was very much adult; she could feel that to her core.  

Yet another wave passed through her body and made her heart jump.  The pegasus was elevated somewhere, though she didn't know where.  The water surrounding her was the fluid around her, and inside of her.  It pulsed with her, and undulated more rapidly with her heartbeat.  The tide spilled more and more out across beaches from far off worlds with each lungful.  The deep's enormous pressure grew around her, first as a hug, and then as much much more.  

Tremors turned to quakes, she had power, the power of the tide between her arms, between her legs, and her every movement was taken into her very world, she gasped again.  The pressure had grown around her, was it pleasure or pain?  The waves clashed into her, were they resisting her?  No, they were pushing, helping.  She moved with them, writhed in them, breathed them into herself; she shared herself, her entire being just as the ocean had shared its.  She felt a current brush her thigh, and then her cheek, and then every single hair in her mane.  She felt it caress her lips, a kiss?  It caressed everything — she could feel it touching everything — and breathed heavier.  The swell clashed on the shores now; the tide had brought it over the sand and against cliffs, mountains, and walls.  Does the ocean batter the shore, or does the shore batter the ocean?  Fluttershy was the shore, the waves flowed into her, against her, onto her.  They flowed around her as a landmass, and yet she was as the water; constant and flowing.  All was moving into itself, becoming one, becoming more.  She had joined together with something, a constant production and destruction, a primal force.  As the sea extends, so is the shore destroyed, and as it recedes, further does land reach into what was once ocean.

Life and death.

Harmony.

It was perfection.

Fluttershy never stopped falling, but she did let go; she did fall away by her own power, and loved herself for it.  She let her body wash away and dissolve, and she didn't want to go back into that prison again.  She embraced her partner, and kissed him.  She couldn't help herself, what she felt was beyond indescribable.  The green pony kissed her back, returned everything she gave, and opened his teal eyes in the darkness of the abyss; the only source of light around.  She leaned back and rested onto the ocean floor, her partner beside her, and looked up at the amorphous spot of light that tried its very best to penetrate all the way to where they were.  She reached up to it, pawed at it with her hoof, such an ephemeral thing light was.  She watched it burn away and fade into blackness just at the edge of her vision, as it does every single day.  She turned her head to the left and caught a glimpse of what the last rays of light reflected off of, and they looked distinctively, disturbingly, like the teeth of an angler fish twisted into a smile just next to her face.

The teeth opened and revealed themselves to have been her eyelashes filtering daylight.  Fluttershy sat up and gasped for the last time that night, only it didn't come out like a frightened one.  She looked down, felt the cool air flow over her cheeks to reveal a very familiar feeling of burning blush, and she saw another 'ocean' that had brought itself on at some point while she had been asleep.  Her sheets around her thighs were soaked, and not from sweat, which just made her blush even more intensely.  The pegasus, confused and uncomfortable looked over at her bedside table.  The sleeping pony on the label of Twilight's bottle of sleeping pills taunted her.  She reached out for the bottle and twisted the cap so hard it broke the child proof seal.  Fluttershy didn't think; she just poured the entire bottle into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed the pills.  She fell back onto her pillow and clutched her heart with a hoof; she wanted to go back, forever.  Tears built in her eyes, and blurred her clock face, though she could see that it was nearly noon and she had slept all the way through her alarm; she didn't care.  She didn't fall asleep as rapidly as she had expected, but after a few very uncomfortable convulsions, the darkness surrounding her vision crept in, overtook her, and drove her mind into a dangerous slumber.