Please enjoy this unconnected half-scene · 6:51pm Apr 2nd, 2020
Bon Bon loved Lyra for reasons too numerous to count. Well, maybe, if given enough time, she could count all of them, but she had more important things to do with that time. Like be with Lyra.
Rather than count them, it was easier for Bon Bon to appreciate each reason to love her wife as that reason came up. And at this particular moment, she was appreciating both how Lyra taught her to see beauty in the world and how Lyra taught her to not worry so much about what other ponies thought of her.
They were in the park, sitting on Lyra’s favorite bench. It provided a great view of Ponyville’s goings-on at the perfect distance – close enough for a pony to feel like she was a part of the town but far enough away to not have to interact with anyone. On a beautiful day like the one the pegasi had arranged, it was the perfect spot to enjoy the weather, the town… and her very special somepony.
Bon Bon was sitting on the bench the way most any pony would sit. Lyra, of course, had chosen her unusual human-mimicking posture. Enough years had passed that Bon Bon no longer cared whether anyone stared at the pony who would want to sit so close to the weird green unicorn. Because Lyra was her weird green unicorn.
Also, the way Lyra was positioned down low on the bench made it really easy to lean over and nuzzle her. Bon Bon was still working on not feeling self-conscious about that. Hearing the tiny contented noises Lyra made whenever she did it certainly helped.
Bon Bon moved over to Lyra’s ear. Quietly, she said, “Do you ever think about how, when we’re pony-watching, other ponies are watching us?”
“That’s fine by me,” Lyra said. “Let them look at the happy couple. If somepony’s going to pony-watch me, then I want them to see how happy you make me.”
Bon Bon briefly nuzzled the back of her head. “Yeah,” she said. “And I guess it isn’t so bad if you don’t know they’re doing it.”
She let her gaze casually scan the nearby buildings. Some businesses, some residences, some businesses that also served as residences… all surrounded by strong, healthy trees and broad, lush bushes.
Bon Bon’s attention was drawn to one of the bushes far on the other side of the path. She saw something sticking out – it looked like the ends of a pair of small telescopes, but instead of glass lenses, each frame was surrounding a yellow eye with a red pupil.
She briefly glanced down toward Lyra’s head. “Off to the left,” she whispered. “Do you see—”
When she looked back up, the bush was now less than three meters away from their bench. The eyes were pointed directly at them. An antler and a goat horn stuck up from the leaves.
Bon Bon sighed, sat up straight, and turned to the bush. “Okay, that’s—”
The bush started to slowly move toward them.
“I get it,” Bon Bon said.
Lyra gave the bush a small wave. “Hi, Discord,” she said lazily.
The bush stopped moving. Instead, the lenses extended out from the foliage, slowly approaching until they were mere inches from Bon Bon’s face.
“Yes,” Bon Bon said flatly. “I’m uncomfortable being watched. Very good.”
Discord stepped out of the bush. The lenses retracted directly into his head with an audible slide whistle sound.
“Greetings, ponies!” he said to the two of them. “You’ve caught me during one of my regular bird-watching expeditions. Can you guess what type of birds I just spotted?”
Bon Bon opened her mouth to answer.
“Lovebirds!” Discord said, materializing a piece of paper displaying a checkbox and two interlocking hearts. Turning one of the digits of his paw into a pen, he placed a checkmark over each of the hearts.
“Mm-hmm,” Bon Bon said. “Aren’t you usually at Fluttershy’s?”
“Alas! Fluttershy is out of town for the next three days!” He fell backward, performing a remarkable imitation of Rarity on her fainting couch. It was especially remarkable considering that he didn’t change the shape of his draconequus anatomy and that there was no couch underneath his suspended form.
“Then aren’t you usually with one of her other friends?”
“And the rest of the gang is, too. You know, it’s very rude to interrupt.”
Bon Bon’s brow knitted.
“Besides, Fluttershy suggested that I practice being kind to strangers. And you,” he said, pointing to Lyra, “are one of the stranger ponies around.”
“Hey!” Bon Bon said.
“Oh, relax,” Discord said. “It was a compliment. It means she’s interesting. Unlike most ponies here. Completely interchangeable. I mean, really. Over a hundred ponies in this town and most of you just blend into the background.” Like a particularly advanced chameleon, his body changed to match the colors of the landscape behind him.
Suddenly, his voice came from behind them. “So…” he said. Even though they could see the outline of his body in front of them, when they turned their heads to follow the sound of his voice, they saw him leaning over the back of the bench. Simultaneously, they performed a double take, only to find his original body gone.
“…I’ve come today to do you both an amazing favor!” he continued without missing a beat. “I’m here to show you that other ponies would be worse off…”
He teleported away, only to instantly appear in front of the bench in black and white, wearing a white robe.
“…if you’d never been born!”
The couple simply stared at him. After a few seconds, Lyra spoke.
“We already know that.”
Discord ignored her. “Nonsense! Whenever a pony begins to think that things would be easier for everypony if she had never been born, it’s the duty of powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent spirits to show her how important she is to the well-being of Equestria.”
“You’re the spirit of chaos,” Bon Bon said. “How are you benevolent?”
“I’m the reformed spirit of chaos. And don’t change the subject. It was your thoughts that brought me here in the first place.”
Lyra looked at Bon Bon in shock.
“What? No! That was over a decade ago!” Bon Bon protested. “My last year of school! You know how awful that year was for me! And I might have been depressed, but I never thought about acting on it!”
She turned toward Discord. “And I would never think that way now. So you can go bother somepony else with your life lessons.”
“It’s too late! We’re here to show each of you what Equestria would be like if you hadn’t been born.”
“We?”
Discord gestured to his left, where an exact duplicate of him was standing. They each reached out their talons to the pony who was closer. “Come with me,” they said in unison.
“If it’ll get you to leave us alone, then fine,” Bon Bon said as she got up from the bench. “But you can leave Lyra out of this. Both of us know how important she is to Equestria.”
“We know you two are a package deal,” the Discord closer to her said. As he led her away, the other Discord took Lyra’s foreleg and helped her up, her posture not changing as she rose off the bench.
“Now come along! Your alternate future awaits!”
Author’s Note:
Rather than count sheep, I’ve found that when I’m struggling to fall asleep, a more enjoyable activity is to ponder these two characters that I’ve written multiple stories about.
One of the hypotheticals that I found interesting to explore was exactly what would have happened to each of these two if she had never met her wife. I don’t know whether it’s improved the way I write them, but it did help me to understand what they mean to one another.
I thought about turning this into a proper story, but then I realized a few things:
a) It would just be a giant headcanon dump that primarily rehashed noncanonical events I’ve already written about.
b) It would be a real downer of a story. No one wants to see Lyra sad at having to look at a Bon Bon who never completely recovered from the coma and is going through a lonely, rote daily routine. No one wants to see Bon Bon sad at having to look at a Lyra who lives in a tiny Canterlot apartment with a roommate she only kind of gets along with, trudging to the middle-school music teacher job that has robbed her of the inspiration to create. And what would either of them learn from it? Like Lyra said, they both already know that they have meaning in the world and that they mean the world to each other.
c) Examining all of the implications would get out of control really fast. To use just one example: If Bon Bon’s parents didn’t have her, then they would keep trying and ultimately have some other foal – let’s say a colt who grew up to become a banker and get married. What does it mean that he married a mare who would have otherwise married someone else? And so on. (Additionally, Bon Bon’s parents would arguably be happier – certainly less distraught over the course of their lives – in this alternate timeline, which is also depressing.)
But the Discord stuff was fun to write. And if you have your own “universe” that you’ve been writing in, I invite you to consider the reactions of a character who has to confront a world in which they were never born. It might not be worth a story, but it will help you understand your characters better.
An interesting thought exercise... though I propose an alternative: The couple continually escapes, evades, or ignores Discord's continuing attempts to do the "It's a Wonderful Life" routine. Why focus on the two of them being miserable when you can track him getting frustrated by ponies who refuse to play along?
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My initial reaction is that Discord has too much power at his disposal for this plan to be completely thwarted (and he really does think he's being helpful in his own conflict-causing way). Although now that you bring up the idea, I can see how they might subvert his expectations...
Bon Bon blinked. Now the two of them were standing on a sidewalk deep in one of Canterlot’s middle-class neighborhoods.
Discord looked at her with a critical eye. A single, oversized, critical eye. “I just told you about six ponies who wouldn’t be alive today, yet you barely reacted. Are you secretly some kind of up-and-coming villain that I need to warn the girls about?”
“That’s because this is all hypothetical. It isn’t real, so I don’t have to feel sad about it. Also, it’s seven.”
“Seven?”
“The whole point of this scenario is that I’m not alive, either.”
Discord stood in place, one talon pointed upward and his jaw silently hanging open.
“So can I go back now?”
Discord rapidly shook his head back and forth to the sound of a tin can rattling. “What? No!” His voice turned solemn and he leaned down to her eye level. “There’s still one more pony whose life was affected because you were never born.”
Bon Bon sighed. “All right. Fine. Show me Lyra. If it’ll make you happy.”
Visible puffs of smoke came out of Discord’s nostrils.
“Because we’re in Canterlot. If I hadn’t been born, she wouldn’t have moved to Ponyville. And obviously you’d save her for last.” She looked down the street. “Ah. There she is.”
The two of them watched as Lyra walked slowly down the opposite sidewalk, her ears down and her neck nearly parallel to the ground.
Discord cleared his throat, stood up straight, and went back to using his sorrowful narrator voice. “It’s Lyra Heartstrings, but not as you know her. Because she never met you, she never had reason to move to Ponyville.”
Bon Bon rolled her eyes.
“Instead, she stayed here in Canterlot, where she rents a tiny two-bedroom apartment with a stallion named Silver Platter.”
“Only one roommate?” Bon Bon said. She thought for a moment, then nodded. “She took the teaching job.”
Discord tilted his head ninety degrees. “How did you know…?”
“She’s my wife. We communicate and I know her. There were no jobs for a professional lyrist but she didn’t want to disappoint her parents after they were so supportive of her through music school. So she must have taken a job teaching music at one of the local schools to at least justify her degree.”
“Well, do you know what grades she teaches, little miss detective?”
“Of course not. I can’t see into alternate realities.”
Discord scowled. Bon Bon smirked.
Through clenched teeth, Discord said, “Anyway, Silver Platter doesn’t indulge Lyra in her eccentricities. As a result, she…”
He paused and looked at Bon Bon, who regarded the scene with only mild interest.
“Fine. You want the worst of the worst? Then that’s what we’ll do. How about I show you who she’s currently dating?” He prepared to snap his talons.
“Does she love her more than me?” She smiled as she asked it.
He froze. “I beg your pardon?”
“See, now you’re stuck. If Lyra loves this other mare more than me – which I already know she doesn’t – then you’ve failed in your mission to prove that ponies would be worse off if I had never been born. So you’re going to show me Lyra in a bad relationship, or maybe a series of bad relationships, or maybe even a mediocre marriage. Sure, I don’t like seeing Lyra sad – and maybe I even feel a little jealous of this other mare – but then I remind myself that none of it’s real so it doesn’t matter.”
Discord simply stood and stared. Not even in a humorous way.
“This whole to-do only works if the pony you’re lecturing actually thinks other ponies would be better off without her. And as I’ve been trying to tell you from the beginning, I don't think that anymore.”
The draconequus became slightly transparent.
“Look, if it makes you feel any better, you did succeed in your goal of upsetting me. Just not in the way you were going for.”
Discord continued to quietly fade away.
“And if Fluttershy asks, I’ll tell her that you did your best.”
Now he was completely gone.
Bon Bon looked around her. “If you think you’re going to upset me by making me think you’re stranding me in this alternate timeline, then I’m just going to go over there and introduce myself to that Lyra. Problem solved.”