//------------------------------//
// Equality 
// Story: Discord's Pet Human 
// by Thorizard 
//------------------------------//

Chapter 7: Equality


The palace burns in front of me, molding with the deep orange of the blazing sunset behind it. I stop to enjoy my accomplishment before continuing on. I take a deep breath and close my eyes, preparing myself for the second part.
For a moment, I consider the idea that this is all a dream. Perhaps, Luna gave me this dream to get all of my anger out, or to show me something I don’t understand. Perhaps, Discord made it all by illusion, just to mess with me as some cruel joke. If either case is true, I am sure of one thing: this is exactly what I wanted.
With a booming voice and a confident mind, shout out at the ponies behind me, “This is my power.” I turn to see them. Some cry and hold their family. Some stand strong in idiotic rebellion. One sits on the grass eating a muffin. “This is the same power that you have used your entire lives. You have held it over those less fortunate than you, and now I hold it against your beloved palace.”
I float slowly into the midst of the crowd, staying high above it as I continue, “Using magic that others cannot; flying to heights that others cannot; doing any task that someone else cannot; all of these are the kinds of things that selfish, ignorant, inconsiderate ponies and humans do every day. I show you now what that power can feel like. When someone has the opportunities or the power that you could never have, it is devastating. You begin to realize that you are worthless while he is worthy, not by choice or hard work but by birth. He is simply greater than you, and today, I am greater than every single one of you ponies here.”
“So what?” says a stupid-looking horse with an orange and white bowtie, holding a crying blue pony that I assume to be his wife. “So what if you have magic that we don’t?”
“What can you do against me? What can you do against this power?” I raise my hands to the sky, letting them see my might.
“He doesn’t have to do anything!” someone else shouts. I can’t find the speaker.
“Yeah! What can you do against all of us?”
“You’re just one po-human!”
“Shut up!” I demand, stomping my feet on the air and eliciting a thud. “Don’t you all understand my power? Did you not see me destroy your princess’s palace? Do you not see what I can do to your town?”
“Go ahead and try!”
“Burn it down and you’ll go with it!”
“We can rebuild houses!”
“Yeah, but you can’t rebuild your face when we finish! Oh!”
Some of them start laughing. They are actually making jokes at me. They laugh at me. They don’t understand obviously. They’re too stupid to understand their situation.
“Your princesses won’t save you! I can kill all of you!”
“Yeah, right!”
“We don’t need princesses! We have each other!”
“We can take you out together!”
“Together! Together!”
They start to chant it. They all chant it. 
“Together! Together! Together!”
I feel myself backing away, but I stop as I feel the heat of the fire at my back. They walk toward me.
“Together! Together!”
How can they be so stupid? They think they can beat me given my power?
What can I do? I won’t be forced to run away by a mob of useless ponies. But what can I do? I don’t know how to stop all of them. There are just too many, and I can’t hurt them directly. I can’t do anything to them, not all of them, not all at once. They’re advancing. They’re closing in on me.
“Pegasi!”
A swarm of Pegasi in V-formation fly straight for me from above the clouds ahead. I’m out of time.
“Take him out of the sky!” their leader shouts.
I ready myself to fight back. I won’t run.
“Bring him down so we can rip him apart!” an Earth Pony shouts
I dodge the leader’s attack easily, and I barely get around the second hit. They surround me. What sort of magic could I use? One strikes my shoulder with a strong hoof, nearly throwing it out of its socket. I have to do something. I dodge a kick to the face. What can I do? I block a kick to chest, but it breaks my hand anyways.
“Run,” says a voice in my head.
A kick in my back sends me forward, arms flailing. This last kick to my face might kill me. Run? I have to run.
I’m outside of Ponyville, bruised and aching. I can still see the smoke from the palace, but I have at least a few moments to rest. I lie on the grass, hoping to become one with it, to hide and rest under everyone’s feet. They would never know I was there. It was my fate all along. I wish I had the magic in me to make it so.
“Did you learn anything, Caleb?” says a particularly smug voice lying next to me. I won’t look at him. I don’t want to see his taunts. I just want him to kill me or let me be.
“Ponies aren’t as willing as you to let themselves be ruled,” he says. “They don’t just admit defeat so quickly. In fact, most humans are much slower to admit defeat than you. I guess humans and ponies have that in common.”
“What do you want, Discord?” I ask.
“I want you to look at me and take this seriously,” he says. I’ve never heard him sound so forceful.
I look at him. He’s the size of my finger, and he’s sitting in a black leather chair with an identical chair six inches across from him. “Take a seat,” he says. It isn’t an invitation. It isn’t a taunt. He honestly means for me to take part in his circus.
I shake my head and accept it. It’s better than getting hooves between my teeth. I shrink myself down proportionally to him and sit in the leather chair.
“Fluttershy, dear,” he calls. She walks from behind me, shrunken like us, and pulls out a roll of white tape from a bag slung across her back.
I pull my hand away from her as she reaches for it, but regret the decision instantly as pain shoots up my arm and nearly brings me to tears. 
“Relax,” Discord says. “She just wants to dress your wound. You stayed in that fight a lot longer than any intelligent person would have.”
“Yeah? What would you have done?” I ask as she reaches for my hand again. I don’t move, but I don’t resist as she takes it as gently as possible, keeping it so still that I can hardly feel it moving as she wraps bandages around it. I can already feel them starting to cool and soothe my hand.
“In my prime of chaos, they would have been kicking a dummy made of glue while I watched from within the crowd before making my next trick,” he says. “But now, I think differently.”
“What would you do now?” I ask. Fluttershy pulls out some ice and bends me forward slightly as I feel my back screech in protest. She gently places the ice on my wound, knowing where it is without looking at the bruise under my shirt.
Discord turns away, looking off to the side at something. I try to follow his gaze, but all I see is tall grass and some bugs. “What are you looking at?”
“Your world, Caleb,” is all he says before a long pause. “This is the world you have always imagined yourself within. You see yourself as worthless as a bug, shorter than a blade of grass, as important as a speck of dust in the wind.”
“What are you talking about?” I demand as Fluttershy releases my back from pain and leans me back. She moves on to my shoulder, massaging away the pain gently despite her hard hooves.
“You tried to bring Ponyville down to your world, Caleb,” he says, shaking his head. “You wanted them to see your point of view, that everyone was worthless compared to something else. You forced on them something they did not accept, and you had no answer.”
“So what should I have done differently? How could I make them understand me?”
“Sometimes,” Fluttershy says as she pulls her hooves away from my comfortably healed shoulder, “you don’t need to be understood by others. Sometimes, you need to understand them.”
I start to object, but I stop myself and look at her as she walks to Discord’s side. She looks at me with as much love as she ever has. “Why are you helping me?” I ask.
“We’ve told you, Caleb,” she says. “We’re helping you for your sake.”
“Sure, but I just burned down your house,” I say. “I attacked your hometown. Why are you helping me?”
“Because you need it,” she says again. Discord pays full attention to her, not making any kind of disruption besides silently and calmly nodding in agreement, which is disrupting enough in contrast. “Houses can be rebuilt. No one was hurt by any of your attacks because of Discord’s warning, so you really haven’t done anything wrong.”
“How can you say that’s not wrong? And how to did Discord know I was coming?”
He laughs obnoxiously before saying calmly, “How could I not keep track of my own magic? I gave it to you after all, and it’s not like I forgot to keep some for myself.”
“Then why didn’t you just stop me?” I ask. I look down at the huge rocks that must be dirt between grass blades. A lone ant as big as me crawls inattentively by our side. I watch it, hoping that it could make more sense than Fluttershy and Discord’s lecture.
“I promised to fix everything you broke anyways,” Discord says. “No one was ever in danger, except you for a short moment. I’m not sure the ponies were willing to let you off the hook as easily as I asked.”
“You don’t make any sense,” I say.
“Darn, and I’m trying so hard too!” He looks at Fluttershy with his hands face-up, waiting for an answer, but she just shrugs.
“Why would you let me break so much stuff? There’s no point! You let me burn down the palace for nothing!”
“Oh, no, Caleb!” Fluttershy says. “We would never let you destroy the palace.”
“What you saw was just some of my wonderful illusion,” he says while sparkling his fingers over a magic hat. He drops it as Angel Bunny hops out, holding a carrot. “I moved the real palace a short distance away and hid it in camouflage.”
“But why? Why would you do all of that?” I’m nearly crying now. My voice is raised and cracking, and I don’t know how to calm down. “Just tell me why you did that because I don’t get it.”
“Exactly,” Discord says. “You don’t get it, Caleb.”
“What?” I nearly shout, grabbing the attention of the ant.
Fluttershy shooes it away as Discord waits for her. She looks at me and explains, “I’m sorry, but you just don’t understand others, dear. All creatures have something inside that makes them go forward in life. Ponies live for each other.”
“You threatened them and tried to hurt their friends. It only makes sense that they would retaliate. They’ve seen scarier things in their lives than an angsty teenager with a smidge of my magic. I commend you for trying to get creative, but you certainly did not impress anyone with that sort of green skill.”
“I thought I was really doing well,” I say. “I felt like I mastered your magic.”
“Boy, you didn’t even scratch the surface!” he shouts with wide eyes, nearly jumping out of his chair in surprise. “You think that with all my power, I would even have to think about getting 6 Pegasi out of my way? Goodness, I must remind you that I ruled this entire country for years, that I nearly took it over again in a single day after my release. What must a spirit do to get some respect?”
Fluttershy giggles, but I feel as if her laugh is directed at Discord rather than me. “You’ll have to excuse him. Immortality must be hard to stay humble with.”
I shake my head, almost cracking a smile. I can’t believe how close they are when they used to hate each other. Fluttershy doesn’t just tolerate him, but she seems to actually like him. And if Discord could ever love a friend, he loves Fluttershy.
“I still don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” I say. “What am I not getting?”
I look at them both, but neither of them say a thing for a moment. Fluttershy looks up at Discord, and he nods back at her. He sighs, stands up, and reverts us all to our regular sizes. I wait for him to speak, but he still doesn’t. He just turns to look at the town with the few burning, empty spots of what I used to think was a palace and the various ponies all returning to their homes.
“You wanted to make everyone understand that they were wrong to abuse their talents, their magic in the way they did,” Discord says. “You tried to make them understand by threatening them with power. You wanted to bully them into being kind.”
“Well–”
“Can you think of a time where bullying has ever made someone kind?” he says, cutting me off.
“But it’s more than that!” I try to protest.
“It’s really not, Caleb,” Fluttershy says in agreement. “I don’t mean to be rude, but your demonstration didn’t make any sense since you were contradicting it so much.”
“I just wanted–”
“We know you wanted something good, Caleb,” Discord says, interrupting me again. “But is it really good to stop others from being their best just because someone isn’t as good as they are?”
“Not only that, but we are all good at different things,” Fluttershy adds softly. “If we don’t become our best at those things, how can we help anyone at all?”
“I’m great at magic and making chaos. You might even say I’m divine at it. However, I had never had a friend before Fluttershy showed me real kindness. She is so incredibly kind that she made me want her kindness more than I wanted my own happiness, or more properly, my perversion of the idea of happiness. She made me realize that there is no greater happiness than someone being kind to you.”
“So then what’s wrong with me wanting to make people equal? It’s just to make people happier,” I say, hoping they’ll understand.
“Wanting everyone to be equal is great,” she says, “but it should not happen by bringing everyone down to the lowest level.”
“Caleb, you are the one who doesn’t make sense,” Discord adds. “Forcing everyone to be the same will not create any equality in the world.”
Fluttershy chimes in, “Part of growing is seeing what makes others special because of their differences.”
Discord smiles as I let my eyes fall. He sits down and looks up at me. “If we are all the same, we won’t love each other more. If we are all different, we can learn to appreciate difference. We can make ourselves better at things we struggle in. We can make hopes and dreams based on what our friends and role models have done. We can learn what success is because of our failure. We can really start to live.”
“I guess everyone has it all figured out but me,” I say, looking away from Discord again. As soon as I do, Fluttershy walks into my view and gives me such a genuine and comforting smile that I nearly break down in tears.
“Everyone grows at their own pace,” she says. “You have to grow at yours too.”
“I don’t even have a pace to grow at,” I say. “I can’t get better at anything if I’m this stupid.”
“You’re not stupid, Caleb,” she says.
“I just – I wanted to do something right,” I say, and I finally let the tears flow down my cheeks. “I wanted to do something really good. I wanted to make something happen and be somebody for the first time in my life.” My legs are shaking. My throat is swelling, and I can hardly speak. “I – I – I just wanted to be – to be –”
“It’s okay, Caleb,” Fluttershy says, resting her head against my chest. “We’ll love you.”
I fall down and bury my face in her fur. I hug her so tight that I muffle my crying. I feel her fur getting wet from all my tears. I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I look around in shock. It’s Discord’s. He’s sitting next to me, letting out a small smile to complement eyes that could not show more kindness.
“We’ll forgive you no matter what,” he says.
I can’t stop myself from rushing into his arms so fast that I surprise him. I hug him even tighter than Fluttershy, and he hugs me warmly. I feel Fluttershy curl up next to us. For the first time in my life, I feel part of a family.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I know you’re not bad.”
I try to say, “Thank you,” but the fur on Discord’s neck muffles it. I don’t want to let go.
I’ve never felt so comfortable. I turn my head and see the fading light as it prepares to reveal the stars, and I close my eyes slowly. Before long, I fall asleep, and for the first time in a long, long time, I fall asleep happily.