((Prompt: Re-imagine MLP: FiM as a horror series.))
Noise.
Terrible, deafening, suffocating noise. Fluttershy was pounded, beaten upon by wave after wave of cacophonous noise. She could not hear herself think. She couldn't think, not with the incessant, overpowering buzz that assaulted her ears.
Perhaps she could handle it, ignore the sheer volume of it if it were just meaningless static, but it wasn't. It was words. Ponies having conversations. Shouting, whispering, whistling, humming. All of it was on the verge of coherence, and no matter her efforts to tune it out, Fluttershy's brain twisted itself in knots trying to sort out the babble. It would be rude if somepony was trying to tell her something and she was caught not listening to them.
Fluttershy forced her eyes open.
She immediately regretted it. A swirling blur of colors filled her vision. Some part of her mind helplessly tried to identify all the bright shapes as coherent things. Pony, brown, stallion. A barrel of pears, green and brown. Pegasus, white, mare.
Her breaths came short and shallow. The straps of her saddlebags dug into her sides. It's just the market, she told herself. It's just the market. An open-air market. Completely safe. Nothing to fear.
The deafening buzz crowded out her feeble attempts at reassuring herself. The crowds closed in around her. She was going to get stepped on, and it would be her fault for being in the way! There wasn't enough air. Everypony was too close, and she couldn't breathe. The space around her shrank, leaving her with a diminishing circle of hard cobbles and a fading patch of sky above giving way to the encroaching bodies.
“Ma'am?” A voice bubbled to the surface of the soupy pool of sound.
Fluttershy looked up into a pair of eyes. They stared at her, probing her for weakness, judging her sins. She withered beneath their gaze.
“Ma'am, that will be four bits.”
Somepony stepped on Fluttershy's tail. A terrified squeak leaped out of her throat. Before she could bring any sort of will to bear on them, her legs carried her in a yellow streak, fleeing the market square.
As the crowds thinned, Fluttershy slowed, finally coming to a stop to lean against a plaster wall in a deserted alley. She gasped for air, licking her dry lips. The claustrophobic heaps of bodies in the market had been too much for her. Here, she could breathe. Here she could think.
With the return of clarity to her thoughts, she realized what the shopkeeper with that pair of eyes had been saying to her. Four bits. Oh, Celestia, she had been buying something! She'd left without paying; she was a thief! The tightness returned to her chest. She tore her saddlebags off her back and began digging through them. Perhaps if she gave the items back, they might forgive her. Maybe they wouldn't send the guards to come lock her up forever.
Her teeth chattered together as she realized she didn't even remember what she had bought. How could she return the item if she didn't know what it was? How could she even find the market stall again in that terrifying miasma of ponies and products?
The silence of the alley pressed in around her, and she began to miss the crowd's roar by comparison. The market had been terrifying, but at least there were others there. Here in the alley, she was all alone. Fluttershy sank to her haunches, her hooves trembling. Alone. The word by itself shook her. She did not dare contemplate the full extent of its meaning. She was alone, and vulnerable, and lost, and... what was that??
Her ears shot up as a set of hooves echoed through her alley. She wasn't alone. There was somepony here with her! Fluttershy dove behind a barrel. It couldn't possibly be anypony good out here stalking the alleys. All the good ponies were in the markets, shouting and whispering and laughing with each other. The only sort of ponies that came out to deserted alleys blocks and blocks away were the sort that stole things and left without paying.
She wanted to go back to being alone. Alone was good. Alone was great. There was nothing wrong with alone. Just please, oh please let this other pony just pass on by and leave her alone!
Fluttershy held her breath. She tried not to think, for fear she would think too loudly and give herself away. Her heart hammered against the inside of her chest, screaming at her to flee. The hoofsteps drew nearer, and it was all she could do to keep from obeying that instinct. It wouldn't do her any good. She wasn't fast, or strong, and if she tried to run, this frightening alley-pony would doubtlessly catch her. Her only hope was to hold still and maybe they would mistake her for a heap of trash somepony left outside.
No such luck. The hooves stopped right next to her. This was it. The end of the line. Somehow she had always known it would end like this, at the hooves of some wandering thug in a dirty backstreet.
“Fluttershy?”
Fluttershy looked up at the thug. They were awfully pink for a thug, and they wore a smile that seemed a lot more genuine than the smirk she expected to find on the face of a street tough. “P-Pinkie?”
Pinkie Pie helped her to her hooves. “Fluttershy, what are you doing out here?”
Fluttershy's chin quivered. “I... I...”
Pinkie pulled her into a hug. “You look like you could use a nice, big cupcake. Come on, let's go to Sugarcube Corner.”