“Okay! Who killed Angel Bunny?”

All five of Fluttershy’s friends whirled around as she shrieked at them from the entrance to her kitchen. The tray of tea and cups and some of those tiny scones she bought at the marketplace loudly clattered to the ground.

“What’s that you say, Fluttershy?” Applejack asked, as she trotted to her and attempted to obstruct her view of the rest of the room. “Don’t think I caught that right.”

“I said who killed Angel Bunny?” Fluttershy said with a deep set frown.

“Why, no one, of course,” Applejack answered weakly, before looking behind her. “Right, girls?”

All four of them nodded in unison, their lips pulled tight.

“Right, AJ!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed.

Fluttershy roughly shoved Applejack aside and narrowed her eyes at her friends. “So I didn’t just see Angel Bunny on the ground with a hoofprint on his head?”

“Nope! Must’ve been all in your imagination, dear!” Rarity chirped.

Fluttershy’s glare traveled to the rabbit-sized lump underneath her living room carpet. “So that lump under my carpet isn’t the Angel Bunny you hid there when I wasn’t looking?”

“Not Angel Bunny. Absolutely not,” Twilight agreed readily.

“So if I were to lift up my carpet, I wouldn’t find him there?”

“But why would you ever want to lift up your carpet?” Twilight asked.

“To see what that lump is.”

Twilight smiled thinly. “But why?”

“To find Angel Bunny.”

“But aren’t life’s greatest mysteries better left unsolved, Fluttershy? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What could that lump underneath my carpet be?”

Fluttershy ground her teeth. “Not when the mystery is who killed Angel Bunny!”

“Try thinking of it like this, then. Right now, Angel Bunny is both alive and dead, as long as you don’t lift up that carpet—”

“I got this, Twi,” Rainbow Dash cut in bluntly. “Angel Bunny’s just fine, isn’t that right, Angel?”

Both Fluttershy and Twilight turned to find Rainbow Dash seated on the couch, a foreleg wrapped around Angel Bunny’s shoulders, keeping his head upright. His eyes were closed and his tongue lolled out of the side of his mouth. There was a large hoofprint embedded on his forehead.

“Yes, Angel Bunny is totally super duper! Don’t worry about me, Fluttershy!” Angel Bunny said, the hoof around his shoulders flicking his lips up and down to give him the appearance of speaking.

Fluttershy growled deep in her throat. “I know that’s just your voice, Rainbow Dash!”

Rainbow Dash used another hoof to raise one of Angel Bunny’s eyebrows. She continued talking with a high falsetto. “What? No, she isn’t. It’s totally me—Angel Bunny. Don’t you remember my catch phrase? ‘That’s not how I remember it!”

Fluttershy stormed over to her. “Firstly: Angel Bunny doesn’t talk! Secondly: his catch phrase was ‘annoyed sigh’ and that was it!”

The hoof around Angel Bunny’s head went limp and his head dropped lifelessly to his side. Rainbow Dash brought a hoof to her cheek. “Oh, right. He didn’t speak, did he?”

“So it was you who killed Angel Bunny!” Fluttershy screamed.

Rainbow Dash blanched. “What? No, I mean, maybe it was—”

“Now I see what’s happened here,” Applejack announced from the other end of the room. She hurried to them with a short letter in hoof. “Look what I just found. A note from Angel Bunny. I think it’s a suicide note.”

Fluttershy ripped the letter away from her. She read aloud: “Dearest Fluttershy, I am saddened to say that I will be dying today, but I’m more than all right with it. Just thought you should know so you don’t go blowing up on all your friends or something. Got to go. Bye-bye. Maybe buy more apples in my memory?”

Fluttershy looked up to Applejack, who was nodding with her eyes closed. “Looks like that ends that bit of ugly business.”

Fluttershy held the letter up so everyone could see it. She pointed to the last line. “Signed, Angle Bunny. Angle Bunny!?”

Applejack furrowed her brows. “What? You mean I’ve been saying his name wrong all this time?”

In a fit of rage, Fluttershy threw the letter down and started pounding on it with her hooves. With a livid stare, she slowly circled her friends. “I want to know who killed Angel Bunny and I want to know now! When I went to the kitchen, Angel Bunny was perfectly fine. Ten seconds later, he’s dead! So who! Tell me!”

“It was me, Fluttershy,” Twilight said earnestly.

“No, she’s lying!” Rainbow Dash yelled. “It was actually me! I—”

“Knock it off! Knock it off, both of you!” Applejack roared. She held her head low. “No more fibbing. I don’t like it and it wasn’t right in the first place. The truth is I walked over to the window while you were in the kitchen and then one crunch sound later, it turned out I stepped on Angel Bunny by accident. But only by accident, Fluttershy. I mean, all things considered, I think it was bound to happen sooner or later—six ponies, four hooves each, inside a tiny cottage full of tiny creatures scurrying around all over the place. I think it was only a week ago that Rarity stepped on one of your salamanders and threw it behind the couch.”

“So that’s what that smell was,” Rainbow Dash said. “Poor Sally.”

Fluttershy collapsed to the floor and started playing with a lock of her mane. “How could you, Applejack?” she croaked, tears welling up in both eyes. “You killed Angel Bunny.”

Applejack sat on the floor with her. “I know, Fluttershy, and I just feel downright terrible about it. But listen here—I’ll get you a new rabbit just as soon as I can. How’s that sound? Angel Bunny was getting pretty old, wasn’t he?”

“But Angel Bunny was perfect… he was special…” Fluttershy continued quietly, “He was horrible and mean and nasty and—”

Applejack jolted back suddenly. “What’s that now?”

“Angel Bunny. He was a monster. The worst monster of them all.”

Rainbow Dash climbed off the couch to be closer to them. “Then why are you even sad he’s dead, Fluttershy?”

She looked up at her with wet cheeks. “Because I wanted to kill him.”

Her five friends shared a collective gasp.

Fluttershy sighed. “I know it sounds weird, but… Angel Bunny was the closest thing to pure evil I ever knew—and that’s why I decided months ago that I had to kill him; that I had to be the one to end it all. I couldn’t live with myself if I ever hurt an innocent little creature… but Angel Bunny didn’t count.”

“What ever were you going to do to him?” Rarity asked tentatively.

Fluttershy motioned towards a text the size of a phonebook on the coffee table. “I wrote it down—all of it. Everything I was going to do during Angel Bunny’s last sixteen and a half hours on this Earth.”

Rainbow Dash gingerly flipped to a random page in the book. “Oh, wow! There’s even pictures! And this is just volume one! But some of this doesn’t even look physically possible, Fluttershy.”

“It is, Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy answered. “I did the research and everything.”

Twilight grimaced. “So that’s why you asked to borrow that book on historical torture techniques.”

Fluttershy nodded. “Yes. I was going to hit him over the head with it.”

Applejack wrapped a leg around her. “Awe shucks, and here I ruined everything for you. But, hey, you never know! One of us could always come across another animal just as evil as Angel Bunny. There’s always a chance, right?”

Fluttershy begrudgingly agreed. “I guess so, Applejack. Angel Bunny was just so perfect, though. The only living being I could ever imagine horrifically murdering and being completely fine with it.”

And so, the very next day, a small funeral was held where Angel Bunny was quietly laid to rest. Attendance was low and few tears were shed, aside from Discord, Queen Chrysalis, King Sombra and Tirek, let out of Tartarus on a day pass. They’d truly lost one of the greats that day.

On the other hoof, the reception following the funeral was one of the largest gatherings in equestrian history. Drinks were consumed. Cops were called. And a new national holiday was born: “National Bunny Crunch Day”.

Fluttershy even got a new pet from one of her friends after. A puppy that immediately barked at her and bit her on the leg.

Fluttershy couldn’t be happier.

Author's Notes:

Was looking at some "The Hateful Eight" reviews and they kept on using the term "murder mystery", so I thought about an MLP murder mystery. Then I thought about who I could kill that no one would really care about. And that's how this... thing happened.

Eeyup.