Fluttershy was returning today. Discord could barely contain his excitement. When Pinkie Pie said that she and the others would be meeting Fluttershy at the train station, Discord quickly interjected, "I'll go with you!"
"Sure, but you know Fluttershy! She doesn't like a fuss made over her in public! So no balloons, confetti, tubas, flugelhorns, banners, drumrolls, cannons, or anything else like that!"
Discord actually knew that, but he made a face, and produced a very tiny cannon in the palm of his hand. "Not even a tiny one?" he mock-pouted.
"Not even a tiny one! I tried that one year and Fluttershy flew off and hid and she left all her bags at the train station! We had to carry them home for her!"
That, Discord hadn't known. "I knew she was shy, but I didn't know she was ever that shy." He shook his head. "Was this around the same time she screamed and tried to hide from the stained glass window of me?"
Pinkie gave him an odd look. "You know why she did that, right?"
"Because she was a gigantic scaredy-kitten?"
"She told us later that she looked at the stained glass window and she felt like... it was angry, and full of malice, and it wanted to hurt us. Like somepony might feel if he's been trapped in a statue for a thousand years and now he sees the only ponies who could put him back there and he wants to do something bad to their heads to make them not be friends so they can't do that thing, right?"
"Are you telling me..." Discord's brow furrowed, and he stared at Pinkie with an expression halfway between disbelief and concentration. "I was inside that window at the time. Are you telling me she could tell?"
"That's what we think!" Pinkie said, nodding.
He'd known the alicorn and the unicorn mage in the room hadn't been heart-readers, like Cadance, so he hadn't done anything to magically conceal his emotional state. The thought that a pegasus would be able to sense him lurking within the glass had never occurred to him. "That's very impressive," he said, wishing he'd known that before he'd decided to betray her. A pegasus who could heart-read, even under very limited circumstances and maybe only against those who weren't her species, was a lot more interesting, inherently, than a centaur who could steal magic.
"Anyway it happened the year before that, I think," Pinkie said. "She was going to Dizzyworld down in the Hayseed Swamps to talk the alligators into staying away from the park, and she got the park to make them their own protected area that the park would stock with fish for them, and from all I hear she did just fine but then when she got home it was nothing but panic attacks for three days." She shrugged. "I tried to cheer her up but everything I did made things worse and Rainbow had to tell me we had to leave her alone because she needs to be able to take time off from being near ponies at all before she could calm down and socialize. I think she's better at it now that she's been friends with us for a while but that wasn't too long after we all met and became friends! I mean Dashie and Fluttershy were already friends, and I was already friends with Applejack because she always used to bring deliveries to Sugarcube Corner because we don't make apple pies, that would compete with Sweet Apple Acres, but we do make fancy apple pastries like brittanies and danishes and stuff, and we buy zap apple jam to put in ponies' sandwiches, and I used to talk to Rarity when she would come in to buy cupcakes because sometimes when a pony is inspired and she's been working all day she needs a cupcake to keep her energy up—"
Discord pressed a talon against Pinkie's lips. "Enough, Pinkie. I get the idea." He wasn't going to tell her that he'd known all this already, that he'd used every tool available to him in stone to spy on her and her friends from the date of the Rainboom and Twilight's hatching of Spike; he'd known, that early, that those six ponies were destiny-entangled and almost certainly intended to be his future opponents as Bearers of Harmony. He'd been watching as they made friends with each other, waiting for the day when they were all together, because he'd been sure they'd end up with the Elements of Harmony as soon as they were all in direct contact with each other, and as soon as that happened, he'd known the balance would shift and he could start working on breaking out of his prison in earnest. It didn't really seem politic to him to talk to his friends about the days when they were his enemies, not now.
And so he went with the rest of the group – all five of the Bearers, plus Spike – to pick Fluttershy up at the train station. Against his will, he remembered the last time Fluttershy had gone somewhere by train, by herself, and he'd been desperate for her to return – when he'd gotten sick with a mutated version of the blue flu, after giving himself the blue flu in the first place, and then a tatzlwurm had suppressed his magic and the flu viruses that had mutated from proximity to his chaos magic had made him incredibly ill. Twilight and Spike and Cadance and Pinkie Pie had all gone out of their way to help him and take care of him, before Fluttershy got him... and he'd repaid them all by letting Tirek take their magic.
Everything nowadays reminded him of his own guilt.
After what seemed like it had to have been three or four hours, but was according to Rarity and her elegant diamond-studded timepiece on a chain only a few minutes, the train pulled in. Discord was floating, unable to stay on the ground from excitement. At least he was managing not to bounce. Pinkie Pie had that angle covered, sproinging up and down in place.
Several other ponies disembarked. Fluttershy was one of the last to come out. "Fluttershy!" Rainbow yelled, before anyone else could say anything – though Pinkie Pie began yelling "Fluttershy!" repeatedly a second after Rainbow did, bouncing as she did so. Rainbow continued over Pinkie. "Great to see you're back! Can I take your bags?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Rainbow, I should take Fluttershy's bags," Discord interjected, teleporting between Fluttershy and Rainbow so that Rainbow's dive toward Fluttershy resulted in her smacking into Discord's chest instead.
"Oh, it's fine, I can manage my own bags," Fluttershy said. "Please don't fight over it."
"How did things go?" Twilight asked.
"They're rebuilding everything quickly, which is good. There's a few animals who were scared enough that they didn't want to come back to the zoo, but I think I managed to talk them into it." Fluttershy was plainly struggling a bit with her valise.
"Fluttershy, just let me carry your bag," Discord said, reaching for the valise by stretching his arm to a ridiculous length.
Fluttershy shook her head. "It's fine," she said, not looking at him. "A little exercise won't hurt me. The real problem was the lion; she was very hungry, and obviously, to a hungry lion, ponies look like food. It was hard to convince her to come back without pouncing on anypony."
"Oh my goodness! That sounds so frightening!" Rarity said.
"Not really. I mean, it's a little frightening, because you never know if the animal is going to listen to you, in the end. Usually they do, though. And eating a living pony, well, you're going to have to bite through a tough hide, covered with a coat –"
Spike looked slightly green. "That doesn't sound tasty," he agreed.
"Whereas if you come back to the zoo, you get delicious tuna steaks, and turkey, and we train the lions to prefer those kinds of foods to ponies. It's what they're used to."
"I suppose lions aren't very adventurous in their diets?" Discord asked.
"They're really not," Fluttershy said, still not looking at him, but at least she was talking to him.
Applejack said, "Still, it's kinda worrisome to think about a lion loose in Manehattan. Especially a hungry one. What if there'd been a foal around where the lion could get her?"
"That's why they wanted me to come," Fluttershy said. "It was very important for ponies' safety but also the lion's safety to get her back to the zoo; an earth pony mother defending her foal from a lion might, um, well, earth ponies are very strong, and a hoof could do a lot of damage to the poor lion, and then you imagine what a unicorn might do, so it's really best for the lion to be in the zoo."
"You should have asked me for help," Discord said. "I could have snapped up some raw red steaks. Lions love those."
"Um, yes, but there's two problems with that," Fluttershy said. "The first is, we don't want the lion learning to like red meat. Cows are made of red meat. Ponies are made of red meat."
"How do you know what color the meat of a pony is?" Twilight asked. "I mean, as far as I know only griffins care about the color of a meat source, and griffins don't eat ponies anywhere in the world."
"That you know of," Discord intoned ominously.
"And secondly, Princess Celestia said you have to stay in Ponyville, so you couldn't have gone to the zoo in Manehattan even if it wouldn't have been, um, not the best idea for other reasons." She glanced at him, but briefly, so briefly.
"I thought everypony knew that ponies are red meat!" Pinkie said.
"Uh, no, Pinkie, why is that a fact anyone needs to know? How do you know it?" Twilight asked.
"Pinkie knows a lot of weird stuff you can't figure how or why she knows it," Applejack said. "You'll drive yourself plumb crazy trying to figure that out, Twilight, I thought you knew by now."
"Anyway, darling, we've got your usual travel decompression kit waiting back at your house," Rarity said. "Pinkie brought over a cake, and Applejack's going to make you some warm fritters, and I've got a new plush bathrobe and a hot lavender bath waiting for you, and Spike's volunteered to give you a back massage if you need one."
"I did?" Spike said. "I mean, yes, of course I will!"
Discord glared down at him. "I hardly think that's appropriate," he said. "Fluttershy has more than one friend with fingers, and I'm much stronger than Spike, and I have magic."
"It's fine," Fluttershy said. "I really don't need a back massage. The hot bath will be fine."
"I could snap you up some bubble bath soap," Discord said desperately. "Cherry almond scented? With scrubbing bubbles? That hum?"
"That sounds perfectly nice," Fluttershy said. "You can do that if you want to. As long as the humming isn't very loud."
"They could make bird sounds instead..."
"No, that would just confuse my bird friends."
"Can you imagine?" Pinkie said, giggling. "What if your friend was in the bath and the bath kept saying things like 'Purple seventeen donut bus'? Or 'whiskers time for jogging basket?'"
"What about ocean sounds? Ponies like the sound of the ocean, don't they?"
"I went to the ocean once," Fluttershy said, and shuddered. "It was so big. Oh, but I did see some very nice crabs, and a starfish."
"Let's let Fluttershy get back to her house so she can get some food and a bath to get the travel dust off," Twilight said. "And I'm sure she'll want to take a nap. Discord, I want you to come back to the palace with me to consult on making a magical field that can keep animals with predatory intent out but will let other animals in. Rainbow, how about you take Fluttershy's bag straight to her house for her? Rarity, Applejack, I know you're going to want to help Fluttershy settle in. Pinkie, if you've already dropped off the cake then why don't you and Spike go to the market and get more eggs? If you're going to do this pancake thing a lot, you'll want more eggs than we have. And maybe blueberries, or chocolate chips."
"Or blueberries and chocolate chips!"
It did not escape Discord's notice that Twilight had gone out of her way to keep Fluttershy's two most extroverted and high-energy friends away from going to her house with her. Part of him resented the very obvious manipulation and the implications that lay behind it. But... he really did want Twilight to consult with him about magic questions. And the magical field she was talking about was the one Pinkie had said they would set up for Fluttershy to have a garden at the palace, and... it was also obvious that Fluttershy didn't really want to talk to him right now. He snapped his talons. "The bubble bath will be waiting for you as soon as you're ready, Fluttershy," he said. "Lead on, Twilight."
"...thinking that we can tie into the harmonic field of the palace to check intent, so if your intent doesn't harmonize with the purpose of the garden, it won't let you in," Twilight said... he thought, anyway. He'd stopped paying attention as soon as she started talking about integrating harmony into the spell. "What do you think?"
"Fine, fine," he said absently, wondering if Fluttershy would appreciate it if he put his new thinking tree in her garden. He'd first created the thing back when he'd been living at the palace in Equupolis with Celestia and Luna, when he'd been a teenager; back then he'd made it by using chaos magic to modify the seed, because he hadn't been strong enough to just constantly make things out of nothing, but since he'd become the chaos avatar he'd just snapped his thinking tree into existence every time he'd wanted it around.
"Discord, are you even paying attention to me?"
Discord scowled at her. "What do you think?"
"I thought you wanted to help!"
"I did want to help! Until you made it clear that you're going to do the whole thing with harmonic magic, which, in case you have forgotten that I am the Spirit of Disharmony, I cannot in any way, shape or form do anything with!"
"Well, you haven't made any other suggestions!"
"How am I supposed to suggest anything to you when it's obvious you know everything?"
Twilight sighed explosively. "If I thought I knew everything why would I have asked for your help?"
"To keep me from bothering Fluttershy while she's recovering from her trip," Discord said, more of the bitterness he felt about it showing in his voice than he'd really intended. "Oh, I'm sorry, were you trying to be subtle about that?"
Twilight winced. "I'm not just—"
"Maybe not just," Discord interrupted, "but are you going to try to deny that your main reason for asking me to come help you right then was to keep me away from Fluttershy?"
"I haven't forgotten how you whined and complained when I tried to give Fluttershy time to recover from her trip before dealing with you when you were sick."
"Yes, well, I was sick! I'm not sick now! I'm perfectly capable of grasping that ponies need rest and that travel is stressful for Fluttershy. You could have just asked me." He shook his head. "Twilight, you're no Celestia. Don't try to be manipulative. You're terrible at it."
"I'm not manipulating you, I'm just... trying not to be rude. I know how you feel about Fluttershy and I didn't want to have to tell you that you are much too much for her to deal with right now. She really does consider you a good friend, but she just can't handle someone like you right now. She can't handle Pinkie and you're a lot more than Pinkie. And you're emotionally needy and you're clingy, when it comes to Fluttershy. So I wanted to give you something to distract your mind from wanting to go bug her, since she needs a chance to rest. And I didn't want to be rude about it by spelling everything out like apparently I have to because you think I'm trying to manipulate you."
Discord sighed. "I hate to break this to you, but that is exactly what manipulation is. You can tell me that I need to back off for Fluttershy's sake; you don't need to lie to me to make me feel better."
"I wasn't lying to you, though. I do want your input."
"Well, if you want my input, then stop assuming you're going to do this with harmony."
"It's not as if anyone but you can do it with chaos."
"No, but if you want my advice, perhaps you should remember that there are in fact more than two kinds of magic in the world." He lifted into the air and coiled himself. "In point of fact, solving this particular problem would be considerably easier with using disharmony magic than harmony magic."
Twilight frowned. "Why would that be?"
"Because a creature who comes into this garden intent on taking prey is acting in harmony with its nature, because it's a predator who takes prey to survive, but in disharmony with the desires of the other creatures in the garden, since it wants to eat creatures who don't want to be eaten. Harmony magic is, mmm, optimistic – it looks for any source of harmony, because it can build on that. So it'll detect that the creature is in harmony with its nature and quit looking – harmony found! Everything is delightful! Go ahead and let them in! Disharmony magic is equally optimistic, from disharmony's perspective anyway – it'll look for the first source of disharmony it finds, which in this case would be the mismatch of the predator's desire to kill and eat with the desire of the prey to stay alive. Key the disharmony spell to lock creatures out if there's any source of disharmony – and put an exception in for ponies, otherwise it won't let a pony go in the garden if they're mad at their friend – and you'll get significantly better results."
"Huh." Twilight nodded her head. "That does make sense. But how would I go about casting a disharmony spell? Is it just like dark magic?"
Discord shrugged. "I couldn't necessarily say." He became a tiny child draconequus playing with a rattle. "I've been able to access disharmony magic since I was a child." Back in his adult form, he said, "But I've occasionally tried to teach a pony. It never goes well, but there are times it's gone less badly than others. Generally speaking, you access disharmony magic by doing the opposite of what you do to access harmony magic."
"So... think about fighting with your friends?"
"If that's what works for you, sure, but all you really need to do is focus on things about other ponies that are different from you. Things that irritate you, things you're envious of, things you think are great but would rather be caught dead than do them yourself. If you draw mana while you're focusing on your lack of perfect harmony with other ponies, the mana will be just right for casting a disharmony spell. I think. I'm pretty sure that's how other ponies did it, anyway."
"Huh. And then would I cast the spell in reverse, or would I just cast the same spell?"
"I don't know." Discord threw his arms up in exasperation. "I'm not a pony! I don't cast like you do. Your thing with structuring a spell, where you make a framework that will channel the magic into doing exactly what you want? I don't do that. And if I do do that, it was disharmony magic to begin with so I don't need to worry about how to convert it from harmony." He massaged his temple with his lion paw. "I think... I don't know. There were symbols in the structure that the ponies casting disharmony would flip, and others they would leave alone. Experiment with it."
"Are there any books about it?"
He cocked his head and his eyebrow, widening his larger eye and squinting his smaller one. "Twilight Sparkle. I was in stone for a thousand years or so. When I reigned, there weren't any books, that I knew about anyway. Since then Celestia has been in charge of what magic gets studied in this country. Do you seriously think she'd allow there to be books on disharmony magic?"
"You have a point," Twilight conceded, and then brightened. "But the Crystal Empire! There's a vast library there in the palace of works about magic, including stuff that deals with dark magic and chaos magic. They haven't even begun to catalog all of it. Maybe there's something about disharmony magic there!"
Discord pursed his lips and nodded. "I really wasn't able to get into the Crystal Empire much. That whole Heart thing, you know. And I know Sombra hoarded books on magic like dragons hoard gems. So, yes, if there's anything anywhere written down about how a pony can cast disharmony magic, it would probably be there."
"You can read really fast." Twilight paced around excitedly. "Or well, not read fast but you can read a lot of books at the same time. Maybe we could go to the Crystal Empire and you could help me look for a book?"
"I hope you're not talking about right now. I do want to see Fluttershy as soon as she's recovered from her trip."
"Sure, we don't have to do it right away. I've got something to think about now, and a plan to work up." She continued to pace. "I need to think. Do you want to help Pinkie and Spike with the groceries?"
"I'll help them eat them if that's what you mean."
"Well, if you don't want to help them get the groceries, I don't want to give you busywork and I'm sure you have things you'd like to do."
I certainly do, if I was only allowed to do them, or felt right about doing them, he thought. "Tired of me already, Princess?"
"I need to do some thinking, and that means I need to be by myself, without interruptions. So it's not that I'm tired of you, it's that I figure you'd be really bored if I made you sit down and be quiet and not draw attention to yourself, which is what I'd need from you if you were going to stay here—"
Discord made a face. "No thank you. I'll go find something to entertain myself." If I slip over to an alternate reality but it's still Ponyville, does that actually count as leaving Ponyville?
As usual, stepping outside the harmonics made him feel so much better, he wondered why he ever went inside the palace. As usual, he had no idea what he was going to do with his time. He desperately wanted to go talk to Fluttershy now that she was back, but he knew she'd need a nap and some relaxation time before she was ready to interact with friends. Part of him insisted he should go do it anyway, but he really didn't want to upset her, not when things between them were so precarious anyway.
Terrible ideas presented themselves to him, and he shot them down, but with increasing reluctance. What if he made himself sick again and then Fluttershy would have to take care of him? What if he pretended to have been made ill by Tirek taking his magic because he was the spirit of chaos and his magic was a more integral part of his existence than pony magic was? No, that presented the obvious "serves you right" commentary. Maybe Fluttershy wouldn't say that, but what if she thought it? No, no, can't do any of that. All right, what if he went to an alternate timeline? If there was still a Ponyville in the other timeline, could Celestia really accuse him of having left Ponyville? (Answer: yes. The ward would detect that he wasn't present in this Ponyville; it would have no way of sensing that he was in a different one. Also, did he really want to risk running into another Discord?) What if he traveled in time? He could go back far enough that this was Equupolis again, and wear his Twister disguise or some other pony shape, and... not do anything, because he hadn't done anything, because his ability to alter the past was really, really limited. Okay, new plan. What if he just said "screw Celestia" and went wherever he wanted?
That one was a lot harder to reject than it should have been. No small part of him argued that he outranked Celestia, that he was more powerful, that he was the Avatar of Chaos, a cornerstone of magic itself in Equestria and all throughout the world, and taking orders from ponies, even pony princesses, was beneath him.
He reminded himself of Celestia's face as Tirek threw her into Tartarus, as she hugged him and begged him not to disappoint her again, as he gave her candy flowers from their childhood. He wasn't obeying Celestia because he was a herd creature like a pony, mindlessly following authority; he was obeying Celestia because he wanted to win back her trust, and the trust of the ponies who were Fluttershy's friends and maybe his own. Because he'd screwed up in a major way and he didn't want to be the bad guy again.
None of this answered the question of what he could do to entertain himself until Fluttershy could see him.
He wandered aimlessly through Ponyville, committing very small acts of chaos. Zucchini at the market stand yelling "Pick me! Pick me, I'm freshest!" at ponies. Statues with hats on tipping them to passersby. Birds singing as if they were guitars or keyboards. Lampposts taking a little stroll. Tiny things. Harmless things, that reset themselves as if nothing had happened – even the lampposts strolled back to where they had originally come from. But ponies glared at him like he was unleashing a full-on storm of chaos, like he was chasing them down to have Tirek steal their magic, right now.
It wasn't worth it. The chaos didn't make him feel better. It made him feel like everyone was looking at him, which normally he loved, but they were looking at him with disgust and anger and they were right. He didn't know how to handle that. They'd always been wrong in the past, laughably wrong, and he could enjoy the attention as they all stared at him because he knew how great he was and how much better it was to be him than to be a pony. But he really had done something terrible. He hadn't taken anypony's magic, but he'd enabled Tirek, and that had been just as bad.
Well. He had bits. He went to Sugarcube Corner and ordered a soufflé. Chaos was very bad at making a proper soufflé. Mr. Cake trembled and his knees knocked together, but Discord had come by to visit Pinkie often enough that Mr. Cake seemed to be sort of used to him by now. And the soufflé was delicious.
By the time he was done, and had headed back to Twilight's castle, Pinkie and Spike had returned. Discord wandered back into the castle. The harmonics hurt his head, but the possibility of seeing some chaos he didn't have to feel guilty about was compelling, now that he was so very very bored.
After asking Twilight and Pinkie about six times "Do you think Fluttershy is ready for visitors yet?", he finally managed to get a "Probably, you should go check!" from Pinkie, and he was off.
"Fluttershy!" He popped into her living room, arms spread wide. "My best buddy! How are you!"
Fluttershy was on the couch, in a bathrobe, Angel Bunny cuddled in her lap and an assortment of chocolate sweets on the end table. She was reading a book that she hastily closed before Discord had a chance to see much of it, but it looked like it was full of pictures, like one of Spike's comic books. "Hello, Discord," she said, with much less of her usual cheer in her voice. "I'm still very tired from my trip."
"But you have time for your best friend, right?"
A weak smile. "I'll always try to make some time for you, Discord. Would you like some tea?"
"I would!" As she started to get up, he waved her down. "No need to put yourself out for me, I know how to put your tea kettle on. You're tired! You should rest your hooves!" He magicked up a plush ottoman covered with thick, soft fur. It opened its eyes, which were in the side facing Fluttershy. They were big, expressive eyes, looking up at her warmly.
"Oh, how cute!" Fluttershy said.
"Put your hooves on him," Discord said. "He'll purr and give you a hoof massage."
"I do want to try that." Fluttershy leaned forward to put her hooves on the ottoman. Angel angrily chittered at her. "Angel, Discord is my guest and you need to accept that. Now quiet down or go play by yourself." The rabbit glared at Discord, but didn't make a further sound.
Fluttershy put her forehooves on the ottoman. As Discord had promised, it purred, loudly, with a visible vibration. "Oh, that does feel nice. Will he mind if I put my back hooves on him?"
"Not at all! He loves it when ponies do that!"
As Fluttershy got a hoof massage from the ottoman, Discord floated into the kitchen and put on Fluttershy's tea kettle. He could snap up boiling water, but Fluttershy insisted that he do this the long way, with actual boiling water, and he didn't mind that much; the boiling point of water was predictable but the pattern of the bubbles was chaotic. Likewise, he could have created a tea with magic, but he preferred the taste of the teas Fluttershy bought. Randomly he summoned one out of her pantry and put it in a teacup for her.
He brought the tea out to her when it was done. "Here you go! I have no idea what kind of tea this is, I didn't pay any attention!"
Fluttershy smiled. "So tell me about what's been going on with you here."
He tried to think. Not very many things had happened since Fluttershy had left, and he didn't want to tell her about the incident with Stellar Eclipse and the lamps. And he certainly didn't want to tell her about the nightmares. "I had a flying competition with Rainbow Dash."
"Oh, how nice! She's warming up to you, then?"
He chuckled. "She only agreed to do it because I promised she could kick me if she won."
"That's terrible!" Fluttershy gasped. "But did you win?"
"Oh, no. Your friend is quite remarkable. But she didn't kick me; she wanted me to make a banner advertising her victory instead."
"Well, that's good." She frowned slightly. "But... I do know Rainbow is amazing, but I can't see how she could beat you..."
"Oh, it was without magic. Nothing but my flight magic, anyway. I do have that, you know. It's much easier flying with chaos, but that was the whole point." He sighed. "I was trying to find something fun to do that didn't rely on chaos."
"Was it fun?"
"Fun enough."
He found himself telling Fluttershy the story of his brother who could fly. "Hermes! That was his name. How strange, I do know it!"
"Is it really strange that you know your brother's name?"
"In our language – in the draconequus language – you don't call your older brother by his name, you call him Older Brother. And all of my brothers were older than me. I don't remember any of their names, but I must have remembered Hermes because that was what my mother called him."
She patted his arm. "I'm sure he was proud of you." Fluttershy looked up at him. "Do you want to talk about things from your childhood? I'm always happy to listen."
"Eh, it was a long time ago." Discord shrugged.
"It's part of what makes you you, though. We're friends. I want to understand you."
So you'll know if I'm about to betray you again? No. That was uncharitable. Twilight maybe, but Fluttershy was not just pretending to be his friend to manipulate him. "Fluttershy... you know I... I'm really sorry for what I did, right? I don't know how to make it up to you."
"It's all right, don't worry about it." She patted his arm again. He wasn't fooled. There was disharmony surging in her emotional state. Either she was saying something that had no connection to her actual feelings, or her feelings were in violent conflict with each other, or both.
"It's not all right and I have to worry about it. I know it hurt you, Fluttershy. You don't have to pretend it didn't."
"It's all right. It hurt me, yes, but that's in the past now." She yawned. "Anyway, I'm so sorry, but I'm still very tired. I think we should call it a night, okay? If that's all right?"
"Of course," he said, mechanically. He looked down at the end table. She had barely touched the tea he'd made for her. "I can drop in tomorrow if you're not doing anything too strenuous!"
"I do have a lot of work to do catching up. I'll need to find out how the animals behaved for the petsitter, and make sure everyone's been getting the right amount of food..."
"So you don't want to see me?"
"I told you, I'll make time for you, but I might not have a lot of it. So feel free to drop by. It'll be fine. We can spend a few minutes talking at least."
"Can we talk about... this thing? What I did?"
"There's no need, it's all over and done with. Let's not dwell on it. Good night, Discord, I hope you get a good night's sleep."
That was unmistakably a dismissal. "Good night, Fluttershy," he said in a jovial tone he didn't feel, and vanished.
He was a child, chasing after Older Brother, Hermes, through a forest. "Can't catch me!" Hermes caroled back at him.
"Yes I can!" Discord called, and changed the position of gravity so that he was falling toward the horizon rather than the ground. He beat his tiny wings hard to slow his terrifyingly fast descent toward his brother in the distance.
"Nope! I'm faster than you! I'm faster than everyone!" Hermes called back to him, and sped up.
All the other draconequui were flying ahead of him. Fluttershy was also there but she was a draconequus. "Wait for me!" Discord yelled. "Slow down!"
"We're not taking you," a male draconequus named I Run Things said. "You're chaos, and chaos is bad and evil. You can't come with us."
"Slow down! Mommy! Hermes! Fluttershy! Don't go with him! Let me come with you!"
But they just kept flying faster and faster, and he tried to fly faster to keep up with them but his wings were so small and so sore. He was falling through the sky toward the horizon but they were far ahead of him, getting smaller and smaller. "Come back! I want to go with you! Come back!"
Then a pony sawed a tree down with a buzzsaw and it hit him and knocked him out of the sky.
He opened his eyes. Pinkie was snoring very loudly – his "buzzsaw". Discord snorted, and snapped his dragon foot because his upper limbs were tangled in a blanket. Her breathing eased, her airways opening up, and she slept on, breathing normally again.
"Might need to get that looked at, Pinkie," he whispered. "If you're snoring, you're not sleeping well."
Funny how she managed to wake him up from a nightmare every single night even if she wasn't trying. He lay on the pillows, looking up at the ceiling, trying to calm down from the dream. I Run Things? What kind of a name was that? He'd dreamed it in the draconequine language, so it was all one word, but still. Dimly he remembered that that guy had actually existed and had always been yelling at him. Wait, wasn't that the guy who'd given him the name Discord and identified him as the Principle of Chaos? Discord wasn't sure if he actually remembered that, or if he just remembered remembering that. Starswirl had helped him recover the memories of what had actually happened to the draconequui, some time after he'd come to the palace, but that recovery had happened two thousand years ago and a lot of it had faded.
He closed his eyes. "Stop having nightmares," he whispered to himself. "You don't need to have a nightmare every single night. It's getting predictable." Hopefully his magic wouldn't let him do a thing if it was predictable and boring, even if he was asleep and not in conscious control of it.
At least Tirek hadn't been in it this time. Discord breathed deeply, trying to banish the dream and get back to sleep.
Something was frying. Discord's nose twitched, and his eyes opened again. He couldn't remember any dreams after the one about the draconequui, so if he'd had any other nightmares, at least he'd managed to sleep through them.
He got up and wandered into the kitchen, where Pinkie was frying eggs, hash browns, and mushrooms with onions. "Hi, Discord! Do you want some breakfast? If you snap me up some bacons I can fry them for you!"
"Great idea! I could go for some bacons!" Spike put in.
With the harmonics in the palace, Discord could not snap up some bacons. "Naah, I hate repeating myself. I'll take some mushrooms, though. Do you have pickle relish?"
"Bought some yesterday," Spike said. "Twilight doesn't like it, but I love it. Nothing like a hot dog loaded with pickle relish. Sometimes I even marinate rubies in it; really brings out the flavor."
Discord was dragon enough to know what gems tasted like, though without using magic he couldn't eat them, and he agreed with Spike that pickle relish would harmonize well with rubies, which was why he would never eat a ruby with pickle relish. "Twilight is sleeping in?"
"She's not sleeping well lately," Spike said. "So yeah, she might be sleeping a little late."
"Oh?" He raised an eyebrow. "What's wrong?"
"Uh, I shouldn't have to explain this, you were there," Spike said. "Our tree got blown up? You let Tirek take everyone's powers? Tirek almost killed us? You don't think those are good enough reasons to be sleeping badly?"
As Discord himself was sleeping badly for similar reasons, he couldn't exactly argue against that. He really didn't know what to say; expressing his regret was too heavy, this early in the morning, but he couldn't make a joke about it when it was all his fault. "I suppose you have a point," he said. "And I see you have a new refrigerator?"
"Yup! Best magical cooling on the market. Twilight's a Princess now, so I figured she deserves the best!" Spike bragged.
"I picked it out!" Pinkie said. "I always wanted one but the Cakes said they didn't need such an expensive fridge!"
"Look! It's got an ice cube zone, a chill your vegetables zone, a don't chill your vegetables any more than you have to because they won't get ripe if they're cold but you wanna keep the flies off zone, a dairy zone, a leftovers zone... there's even a meat zone, but I don't see us using it for that, really."
Discord raised an eyebrow. He didn't really care about the workings of a refrigerator, but a thought had occurred to him. "Fluttershy should have one of these. She needs a meat zone for the fish and insects she feeds to her animals."
Spike was taken aback. "Fluttershy feeds fish to animals? But fish are animals too! And bugs – butterflies are bugs, so doesn't she care about them?"
"Nature is nature," Discord said. "Fluttershy won't let an animal starve just because its nature requires it to eat other animals. Fish and insects are a lot less sentient than birds and mammals and reptiles, so she's willing to feed them to carnivores." He scanned the fridge, wondering if he could make one. With additions, of course. He'd have a sun zone to help ripen fruits and vegetables that needed it, and a water zone to keep lettuce fresh, and maybe he'd make it bigger on the inside.
The thought occurred to him that it was kind of pathetic to make Fluttershy a better refrigerator than Twilight had when he'd spent three days in the past recovering Twilight's books. He sagged slightly. On autopilot, he snagged the pickle relish with his tail, and shut the fridge, drooping.
"What's wrong, Discord?" Pinkie asked.
"Pinkie, you're supposed to ask me 'why the long face,'" Discord said, elongating his face. It was an effort to do the joke against the harmonics, but not such an effort he couldn't manage it. "And then I say, 'I'm just feeling a little hoarse'—" here he turned his head into a pony head.
"That'd be funny, but it doesn't answer my question! Your head got all droopy for a moment!"
"I'm just concerned because there's not very much pickle relish in here."
"That's a donation from Applejack, there's a whole other bottle Pinkie and I just bought," Spike said. "You can finish that one up if you want. It's too apple-y for my taste."
Pickles and apples? Now that sounded like an interesting flavor combination. He stuck his talon in the jar, licked the relish off, found it as intriguing as he'd hoped, and ended up dumping half of what was left of the jar onto the mushrooms Pinkie gave him.
Twilight shuffled into the kitchen with a wild bedhead. Discord snickered. "Coffee," she groaned hoarsely.
"Coming right up," Spike said. He breathed a light flame gently on the coffee pot, and poured steaming hot coffee into a mug. "Cream? Sugar?"
"Mmuh."
"That means 'yes'," Pinkie translated to Discord in a stage whisper.
Twilight drank half the cup of coffee before trying to eat any of her breakfast. Discord ended up with a glass of chocolate milk courtesy of Pinkie, and he and Spike split some waffles covered with hot chili sauce. Spike sprinkled his with gem dust.
Finally Twilight had pulled herself together enough to make plans, which was apparently what she usually did in the morning. "Okay. Discord, I was thinking about that trip to the Crystal Empire we talked about doing. I think Shiny's just a little ticked-off at you right now, but if you're with me I'm sure it'll be fine."
"What if I don't want to go?"
Twilight sighed. "Then I'll go with Spike, but we'll be able to get a lot more books checked if you come with us."
"Can I go anyway even if you're going with Discord?" Spike asked. "I love the Crystal Empire!"
Twilight giggled. "And they love you, Spike. Yes, of course you can come with me no matter who else I end up going with."
There was a banging at the door, loud enough that they could all hear it even in the kitchen. "I'll get it!" Pinkie caroled, and hopped toward the door. Discord considered teleporting there, and then remembered that in the castle, he couldn't teleport.
"Why don't you want to go?" Twilight asked Discord.
"Now, Princess, I never said I didn't want to go. I asked what if I didn't want to go."
"Ugh." Twilight face-hoofed. "Why are you like this?... never mind. Chaos. I get it."
"So do you wanna go or not?" Spike asked.
The truth was, there was nothing particularly appealing about going to the Crystal Empire, where the Heart was active and the harmonics were all through the city, and reading a large number of books he had no interest in to try to find information he didn't care about, for Twilight's sake. On the other hoof, he owed Twilight his life. On the third hoof, he had done something very difficult and unpleasant for Twilight to pay her back for that. On the fourth hoof, was his life really only worth a library full of books?
"I suppose," he sighed.
Pinkie came back, subdued. "Uh, Twilight. You might want to go talk to them."
"Oh? Who is it?"
"It's a bunch of ponies from the town. They – they have a petition."
Discord didn't like the sound of this. Twilight asked, "A petition about what?" as she walked down toward the door.
"You should just talk to them," Pinkie said.
Discord followed behind them. He had a bad feeling about this.
Twilight threw the doors open with her magic. There were a lot of Ponyville ponies standing there. The mayor wasn't one of them, but the hilarious three who sold the flowers and were always fainting with terror at the slightest bit of chaos were. Most of them were Earth ponies, with a handful of pegasi and a few unicorns.
"Princess Twilight?" A well-dressed beige pony with his brown mane slicked back approached with a petition in hoof.
"Davenport! Hello! I was just thinking I should come by and get a sofa for this castle—"
"Thank you, Princess, but that's not why we're here." He cleared his throat. "We, the undersigned citizens of Ponyville – see, these are our signatures –"
"Davenport, I know how a petition works."
"Right. Well, um."
"Why don't I just read it?" Twilight said, her magic reaching out to pick up the petition. She pulled it over to herself. "We, the undersigned citizens of Ponyville, officially petition Princess Twilight to... banish the entity called Discord from Ponyville and forbid him from returning?" The petition fell to the ground. "Do you guys even know that Princess Celestia forbade him from leaving Ponyville? That he's here as part of his punishment for his involvement in the thing with Tirek?"
"Uh, no..."
One of the ponies in the crowd spoke up. "Why is Princess Celestia punishing us?" Raucous laughter and angry muttering from the crowd.
"Princess Celestia isn't punishing you. The idea is that Discord needs to live among the ponies he harmed, and make reparations."
"Yeah, so then why was he running around the town yesterday causing chaos?" another pony yelled.
Twilight turned on him. "Discord? You want to explain this?"
"It was only tiny bits of chaos!" Discord threw up his hands. "Ponies are just so – hidebound! Look, everything I did was tiny and then I put it back exactly as I found it. I didn't hurt anypony."
"You made my zucchini talk!" one of the ponies yelled. Oh, yeah, he'd been behind the stand selling the zucchini. "Nopony wants to buy talking zucchini! My sales were terrible!"
"And my pet frog started singing and I nearly broke my neck falling down the stairs, I was so startled!"
"Well, that's on you," Discord said. "There's nothing about a singing frog that's so terrifying you should fall down the stairs and break your neck."
"Discord..." Twilight said warningly.
"My cart grew wings and flew off!"
"It did a loop-de-loop and it came right back! And none of your stuff even fell out!" Discord snapped.
"Discord, let me handle this."
"What do they want me to do, stop existing? I can't both be nowhere but Ponyville and not in Ponyville unless I'm nowhere!"
"I'm sure that's not—"
"I'm sure that is!" He turned and stalked off. "You deal with them, Princess. You're the Princess, it's your job."
His room in the castle was right by an exit, the one by the place they'd set aside as Fluttershy's garden. He stormed out the door, slammed it shut, and sat down on a rock. This wasn't a garden yet. The Tree had plonked Twilight's new castle down in what had previously been a perfectly ordinary meadow, covered with grass and wildflowers. In a town full of ponies, meadows never got severely overgrown – there was always somepony looking for a quick snack on their way to work or school. But at least it wasn't manicured perfection like the areas where ponies actively mowed to harvest hay.
He thought about snapping a garden into existence for Fluttershy. Forget Twilight and her desire to go visit the Crystal Empire. He could just do it, the whole thing, by himself.
But whatever he made would be chaotic. Was that really what Fluttershy would want? Her own garden was neat and orderly. It drove him nuts sometimes, nagging him to rearrange some things, disrupt the neat rows, plant some really wild things and watch them take over. He tried not to spend time near Fluttershy's garden because he didn't want to hurt her by messing it up, but he didn't know how hard he could push his limited self-control.
No. A garden was the last thing Fluttershy would want from him.
Morosely he swung his tail and his goat hoof, randomly kicking the grass. The townsponies couldn't handle even the slightest bit of chaos. How was he going to stay in this town without going insane?
The door opened and Twilight came out. "Okay, when were you going to tell me about your little stunts yesterday?"
"Never," Discord said honestly. "They really shouldn't have been any of your business. I put everything back the way I found it within a minute or two. It was really the smallest, most basic, most inoffensive use of chaos I could imagine and it still upset them because ponies can't handle chaos."
"That's not why it upset them," Twilight said. "This town has been through parasprite attacks, Pinkie's baked bads, Sweetie Belle's cooking, Spike turning into a giant dragon, actually pretty much anything the Crusaders ever did... we can handle chaos. We're used to chaos. What they're scared of is you, Discord. You held ponies in place so Tirek could steal their magic."
"I barely had a chance to do that to anyone in Ponyville."
"You did it to enough of them that word got around. Whenever you run around causing small, harmless chaos, you remind them that you exist, and that reminds them of what you did, and what you did was terrible. I know you're sorry for it and you've done a lot to try to make amends with us, but have you tried doing anything for the townsponies to earn their forgiveness?"
"What could I possibly do? If I lighten some earth pony's load by giving their cart wings, they'll probably be terrified that the cart will fly off without them. If I repair a house, somepony's going to object to my inimitable style. The weather team can handle the weather and I'm a lot better with causing storms than sunny days, anyway. So what do I do?"
"Didn't you do this once before? Shortly after you got out of stone, but right after I got my wings, weren't you going around doing chaos to things to improve them, like giving Applejack a whole orchard full of zap apples?"
"Yes, but then the Crusaders decided they needed my help with finding their cutie marks, and, well..." That had almost resulted in him accidentally destroying Ponyville. It had also resulted in the fillies inviting him to be an honorary member of their club, but he didn't want to think about that, not now. "After that, no one wanted me helping out with much of anything."
"Yeah, I can see how that would have happened." She sighed. "Can you maybe keep the chaos out of the Main Street area? You can wander around the Acres, or go out by the lake..."
"Or visit Fluttershy. She appreciates my chaos."
"Yes. Yes, she does. You could go do that."
"I'm going to go do that right now," Discord said, and vanished.
"Fluttershy!" he called jovially.
Fluttershy was not in the house. Fluttershy was not in the garden, either. Before he had a chance to get worried, he quickly pulled out a die and rolled it, and it came up with an image of where Fluttershy was now. It wasn't too surprising to find that she was in the woods – the tamer part of the woods near the border with Sweet Apple Acres, not the Everfree – tending to a weasel with an injured tail.
So he popped in on her there. "Fluttershy! How is your weasel? Is there anything I can do to help?"
Fluttershy visibly startled when he spoke, but calmed down quickly instead of panicking and fleeing. "Oh, Discord. You startled me." She took a deep breath. "I didn't really expect you to come over here while I was working with Mister Weasel, here."
"Well, I didn't know you would be working with Mister Weasel before I headed over here."
"He's really very shy," Fluttershy said. "You might want to head back to the cottage; he's getting agitated with a stranger here. He doesn't know you, after all."
"Oh. Are you sure? I can be very small and quiet." He shrank himself to the size of a mouse and perched on Fluttershy's withers. "See?"
"I really think it would be better if you met me back at the cottage after I finish up with Mr. Weasel."
He sighed. "Oh, all right."
He couldn't very well hang around Fluttershy's cottage while she wasn't there, though. And he couldn't wander around in Ponyville anymore, and the woods was going to be incredibly boring unless he was in the Everfree, where he was not allowed to be because the Everfree wasn't technically Ponyville.
So he decided to find a cloud and take a nap until the ear of corn he'd left at Fluttershy's place heard her come in. He could set an alarm to warn him if a pegasus got too close to his cloud, he figured. It wasn't as if Discord ever slept deeply anyway.
The alarm didn't go off when the pegasus crashed into his cloud, though.
Discord sat up, startled, to meet the crossed eyes of the gray pegasus with the blonde mane.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to crash into you."
Discord recognized her, and flinched.
The last time Discord had seen this particular mare, he'd been tossing her up in the air by reversing gravity, then flipping it back, after Tirek had taken her magic. And she'd screamed hysterically and waved her legs frantically and it had bothered him. He'd done the same thing to the Wonderbolts, but when they'd screamed, it had been words of defiance. The gray mare with the bubbles for a cutie mark and the blonde mane had sounded like she was sobbing between her shrieks of fear.
Ponies being terrified had never bothered him before. Maybe Tirek was right. Maybe friendship had made him soft. Certainly he would never have been taken in by somebody like Tirek in the old days. But he couldn't help it anymore; this was what he was now, what friendship had made him, and he didn't want to be what he used to be.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled, caught off guard.
"No, I'm sorry. I crashed into you. You were just sleeping." She gathered up some pieces of mail that had fallen out of her bag onto his cloud. Apparently, pegasi did something to the mail to make it able to walk on clouds, too. Or stay on clouds, at least, since unless he or a unicorn like Twilight had decided otherwise, mail couldn't generally walk.
"I don't mean that. I mean... Oh, for the sake of chaos, you know what I did! Your memory can't be that bad!"
"No..." The mare shook her head. "I only met you once before. I used to see you around Ponyville sometimes but I don't think we ever talked."
Discord sighed explosively. "I'm talking about when you attacked Tirek and me with the Wonderbolts! That was the only time we met!"
"Oh, yeah. Right."
"So, I'm saying I'm... I'm sorry for what I did to you. I... felt bad about it."
"Oh, that's okay."
"That's okay?" Discord was now floating above his cloud, waving his arms in disbelief. "I tormented you! On purpose! Because I thought it was funny!"
"Was that why?" The mare looked puzzled. "Because I remember that Tirek guy saying he was gonna kill us, and you saying he shouldn't kill us because you wanted to play with us."
"You were awake for that?"
"I was really tired but yeah, I was awake."
Discord looked away. "Yeah. That was what I said."
"So I figured, since you're Fluttershy's friend, that you were telling him that so he wouldn't kill us."
"Uh... sort of, but also, I did torture you because I thought it was funny..."
"But you saved our lives."
"But you were screaming..."
She shrugged, an interesting motion while hovering. "Yeah. It was really scary."
"So, I'm sorry!"
"I know. You said that." She nodded. "I forgive you."
"How can you just – You ponies! You just don't do that!" He spun around, steam coming out of his ears, until his head exploded. Then he reformed behind her. "How can you just... forgive me? Just like that?"
"It isn't hard," the mare said. "You just do it."
"It can't be that easy. I did something terrible to you!"
"I know," the mare said patiently. "I was there."
"But then how can you forgive me so easily?"
"It's not that hard," she repeated. "Isn't Fluttershy your friend?"
"Well, of course!"
"She wouldn't be friends with someone who was evil," the mare said. "And you're sorry for it, right?"
"Yes, that's what I've been trying to tell you!"
"Well, then. If you're sorry for it, then I forgive you," she said simply, like that explained everything. "I have to go, I'm late. You can go back to taking your nap."
Discord watched in bemusement as she lifted off again. It made no sense. But then, when had he needed anything to make sense? He should just accept this. One of the ponies he'd terrorized had forgiven him. That was all that should have mattered.
He needed to talk to Fluttershy about this. Things were tense between him and her, but she was the only one he'd ever been able to talk to about feelings like guilt, and loneliness, and the sensation of not fitting in and actually feeling bad about it. And now, this – more than guilt, he felt confused, and unhappy... that the mare had forgiven him? But why would that make him unhappy? Because he didn't understand how, or why, but he'd never needed everything explained. The world was full of things he really didn't quite understand and he'd just never cared much.
For some reason he cared about this, though. This mailmare wasn't his friend. He didn't even really know her at all. When the rest of Ponyville was submitting petitions to Twilight to have him driven out of town for making just a tiny bit of chaos, how could she forgive him for torturing her?
In a flash, he was gone, heading for Fluttershy's house.
There was a chance Fluttershy wasn't back yet, and he didn't want to look stupid in front of her pets by coming in yelling greetings if she wasn't there. So he appeared silently in her living room.
"...don't know if I can face him," he heard Fluttershy say, and started to summon a teleport so he could join her, but in the time it took him to figure out she was in the kitchen, he heard Applejack's voice.
"Why should you have to? Tell him to go away. He hurt and betrayed you, not the other way around. You deserve to have as much space away from him as you need."
They were talking about him. Discord's blood ran cold. He turned himself invisible so he could continue to listen without them catching him.
"It's not that simple," Fluttershy said. "I'm his first friend. His best friend. And everything he knows about friendship, I taught him. What if he did this because I wasn't a good enough friend?"
He wanted to teleport in and reassure her that that had nothing to do with it, she was a wonderful friend, he'd done it because she was only one pony and if his choices were to have only one friend who told him to reign in his chaos or only one friend who told him to go wild, he'd thought he was better off with the second friend. But Tirek hadn't been a friend at all and he hadn't been thinking about how much betraying Fluttershy would hurt because he'd never had a friend before so he'd never known what it felt like to betray a friend; he'd betrayed Celestia and Luna but he'd been sure at the time that they had betrayed him, and the same was true for Starswirl, who'd sided with the Tree of Harmony against him so he'd killed the Tree so Starswirl and his allies had tried to banish him or turn him to stone, he'd never known which because he'd run. He hadn't wanted to kill Starswirl even though he'd felt betrayed. When he'd come back Starswirl had been gone and he hadn't known where, and he'd felt betrayed by that too. He'd never known what it felt like to betray anyone he cared about because he'd convinced himself they'd done it first. And he hadn't known he had more than one friend.
He hadn't thought about the Cutie Mark Crusaders. He'd been sure Twilight healing him from the blue-now-green flu had been because she feared him being contagious. He'd remembered Pinkie Pie saying she couldn't be his friend because he didn't understand that he'd hurt her other friends. He'd known the other Bearers couldn't stand him. He'd had no evidence that Celestia still cared, at all, in any way. But none of that had been Fluttershy's fault.
"Why in tarnation would you think that?" Applejack said disbelievingly. "Sugarcube, you've been a better friend than anyone like him could ever expect to have. You made friends with him in the first place when he was trying to mock you and wreck everything. You forgave him for that business with the vines. He made Rarity and me sick when you were out of town after volunteering us to take care of him even though Pinkie offered. You forgave him for that."
"He has no experience with friendship, Applejack. And not a lot of positive experience dealing with ponies at all. He's spent thousands of years being a villain who didn't care anything about anypony, and now he's trying to learn how to care about somepony besides himself, and it's hard for him. Even for the Spirit of Chaos, it's hard to change so much." He heard the sound of her chopping vegetables. Probably cutting up a cucumber for her horrible rabbit's salad. "I'm afraid we asked too much of him too quickly."
"All we asked him to do – all Princess Celestia asked him to do – was to use his powers to be useful and stop a threat. You wouldn't think that would be so danged hard."
"He joined Tirek because he thought Tirek could give him something we'd proven we couldn't. He needs chaos, Applejack. He needs to be able to use his magic. Remember how miserable we all were when Twilight switched our cutie marks and memories? That's what happens when you make a pony use their magic for something it's not really for. Asking Chaos to help keep order in Equestria? Was that really a good idea?"
"I don't know, but I do know this. Chaos ain't got a plumb thing to do with friendship. But it's got a lot to do with being unpredictable. And changeable. And not giving a gosh-darn about anypony because if it's gonna care about ponies getting hurt then it ain't chaos."
"I'm not so sure about that..."
"No, you listen to me, Fluttershy. You're the best friend any pony – any creature – could ever ask for. This wasn't your fault, this was all on him."
"But if I—"
"No. You gotta understand. He's Chaos. We've got no reason to believe Chaos can even be a good friend. It's like saying you can make friends with a storm."
"Well, pegasi actually can, if they're good at weatherworking, like Rainbow..."
"Rainbow can control a storm. She can't make friends with it. If she can't control it, like it's in the Everfree, it'll zap her and pay no never mind. And you can't control Discord."
Fluttershy sounded frustrated. "I don't want to control Discord. I just want him to... not hurt us. Or himself."
"That don't sound like a friend much. That sounds like what a mare says about a special somepony who's maybe a little too quick with the hooves, the kind with a nasty temper, if you know what I'm sayin'."
"No," Fluttershy said, and now she sounded upset. He wanted to go to her, to comfort her, to drive off Applejack for upsetting her, but he had to know what she would say, what Applejack would say. "Discord isn't like that. He's not violent. He listens to me, most of the time. He tries to make me happy."
"And he sneaks around behind your back to cause chaos. Or to sell you out to a sweet-talkin' centaur."
"But he wants friendship, I know he does!"
"Sugarcube, I know he wants it too, that's how you got as far as you did with him. But a critter like him, somepony who lives for chaos... you gotta reckon with the possibility that maybe he can't be a good and loyal friend. Some leopards can't change their spots. He says he wants friendship, and it ain't a lie, but... maybe, no matter what he wants, he's never gonna be able to not want chaos more."
Fluttershy burst into tears.
She believes Applejack. His heart dropped into his stomach. Literally. Absent-mindedly he reached in, grabbed it, and stuck it back where it belonged, but the feelings that had triggered the metaphor didn't change just because he'd put it back. She wouldn't be crying if she had an argument to make. She's crying because she thinks it's true.
A black pit yawned below him – metaphorically; he wasn't up to being funny enough to let his magic make it. Because it is.
Tears welled in his eyes, and he fled, teleporting away to end up in the branches of the new library tree he'd made for Twilight. It was true. He was a bad friend. He had betrayed his friends to Tirek because he'd wanted chaos more, and who was to say he wouldn't do it again?
The tears ran freely down his cheeks. Rarity, offering to dance with him to rebuild his reputation. Rainbow Dash, saying his wings were impressive. Spike, hugging him for restoring his comic book collection. Twilight telling Tirek, "All of my friends," demanding that Tirek release him, saving his life. Pinkie, treating him as a plushie, sleeping on him, trying however incompetently to save him from nightmares. Celestia, hugging him.
Fluttershy.
And he couldn't have any of it ever again.
He wanted friendship but he couldn't have it because he was a terrible friend. He'd betrayed Fluttershy and she couldn't face him anymore and she thought it was her fault he'd done it.
The ponies of Ponyville didn't want him here. Celestia had said she wanted him to stay here, as a punishment, but what kind of punishment was it when it punished the ponies who lived here as much as it did him?
He wandered through the woods aimlessly for hours, trying to resolve the question in his head. What could he do to protect Fluttershy from his inevitable fall again? Did he have to give up her friendship because he didn't deserve it? She didn't even want to see him again, did she? And if she didn't, it was only what he had coming, wasn't it.
Once upon a time, he'd have been bitterly angry about this. He'd have gone out of his way to reject his friends before they inevitably rejected him. He'd have felt betrayed that they offered him friendship and then he figured out that it could never possibly last because he wasn't someone anyone would ever want to stay friends with. But he didn't feel that way now; he felt despair and grief and guilt, but not anger, not at them anyway. None of this was Fluttershy's fault. None of this was even Applejack's fault; she'd just told the truth, which was, after all, the thing she did.
It wasn't their fault they'd offered him something he desperately craved when in fact he couldn't have it. It was his. He was broken, he was the monster who could only care about chaos and not about his friends. He was the one who'd tortured a mare for fun while she'd screamed in terror, and now she turned out to be as kind and forgiving a pony as Fluttershy was and he hadn't even known. Or cared. He was the one who'd put his best friend in a cage and dropped her cucumber sandwiches on the ground a minute after she'd defended him.
The sun went down. Should he just go back to Twilight's palace? Pretend he hadn't figured any of this out? Try to act like nothing was wrong and there was no inevitable disaster looming in the future and it was safe for him to enjoy having friends, for a little while, until eventually it all went wrong?
No. He wasn't doing that. In the future, he might not care, but right now, he cared too much about all of them to do that to them. If he left now, while he still understood that hurting them was not something he wanted to do, they'd be safe.
Discord looked around him, looking for somewhere to go. Someplace that was far away from here, far enough away that Celestia couldn't come after him, that the Bearers couldn't be sent to turn him into stone for disobeying her. Somewhere where he couldn't hurt anypony, and where there was no one to object to his chaos.
And then he looked up at the sky, at the rising moon slightly above the horizon, and started to laugh.
Discord snapped his talon, and was gone.
Above him the beautiful blue and green world hovered in the sky, covered in swirls of white that slowly moved. The True Stars, not the "stars" that Luna painted on the sky of the world to frighten away the Cold Ones but the actual literal stars, hung overhead, beautiful and brilliant. In the far distance, he could see the bright shine of the True Sun, the star that the world circled around; the "sun" that Celestia raised wasn't even a real star, but a fusion reactor created and held together by magic. Because night had only fallen recently, the sun was still visible from here on the Moon, shining down on him and across half the planet above him in the sky.
The Moon itself, however, was unbelievably boring.
White rock. More white rock. Craters of white rock, and dust-covered white rock. "Luna, haven't you ever heard of a little thing called 'color'?" Discord muttered, and raised his arms. "Someone needs to teach you how to decorate!"
Magic flowed from his paws. There was no ambient chaos on the Moon, aside from it being struck by an occasional asteroid, but the thaumic field was thick and his batteries were well-charged; he could stay here a long time before he ran out even if he used his magic constantly. He raised his arms and swung them this way and that like a conductor, as all around him fantastic shapes of green and orange coral grew out of the moon rock. The lighter gravity allowed him to make some truly amazing constructs without even having to infuse them with magic to negate or lessen their weight. Gently he floated above the surface of the moon as his coral city grew all around him.
It was too silent, too unmoving. He filled the void around him with atmosphere, thick and heady with oxygen, and then filled the air with fish, swimming through the atmosphere like fish back home swam through water. Insects of great size and iridescent beauty clacked their mandibles as they crawled or flew. Black and blue and vermilion plants sprouted everywhere, photosynthesizing through magic rather than chlorophyll, producing strange spicy fruit shaped like dodecahedrons or tetrahedrons or Moebius strips. Birds strutted all over the ground and the coral shapes, eating the insects, occasionally taking to lazy flight, since if he gave their wings any serious power they might accidentally fly out of his atmosphere and suffocate in the void. His magic blocked most of the intense heat of the sun, making his coral city hot and summery but not a murderous inferno. Craters filled with water, and the water spontaneously leapt into graceful fountains and splashed all around. All the moon dust in the city gathered to the edge of the nearest crater, creating a thick, soft beach of moon dust around the lake he'd made.
Discord lay down on a beach chair he'd made on his moon dust beach, with sunglasses on, and put his paws behind his head. Who needed friends, when without them he could go all out and build this?
He ignored the tiny voice in his head that said that without anypony to show all this to, it was pointless. He'd gotten very, very used to ignoring that voice over the years.
A flying small Discord dressed as a mail carrier, with a comically oversized mailbox dangling from a rope around his waist, popped into existence and caroled, "You've got mail!"
Discord reached out and the mailbox vanished, two scrolls falling into his paw. The thaumic signatures told him they were from Celestia and Luna, respectively. He grinned broadly. Of course, the ward had triggered and told them he'd left Ponyville, and of course, Luna would know where he'd actually gone, but neither of them could get here; Luna could raise the moon but she couldn't fly to it. So they were forced to resort to writing him letters.
Oh, this was going to be fun.