Daring Do blinked sweat from her eyes as she studied the artifact. Its large, rusty frames rested on a sandstone pillar at the center of the chamber. Twin lenses glinted in a beam of light lancing down from the cavern's ceiling . The only missing detail was its linen head-strap, which must have withered to strings by untold centuries spent deep underground.
“I have you now,” she whispered, smirking as she reached for the goggles.
There was a flash as Discord appeared on the stone path just outside of Fluttershy’s cottage. Garish sunlight reflected off the notecards he’d been studying, causing him to squint and look around at his sunny, green surroundings. “I usually end up inside,” he muttered, looking back down at them. He flipped through a couple of the cards before settling on one he particularly liked.
He cleared his throat and spoke quietly. “‘Fluttershy, there was a time when my heart was... as stony as that time I turned to stone...’ Ugh, what dreck.” He paused, shuffling a few cards. “‘Fluttershy, the times when you and I get together for Tuesday tea have come to mean the world to me...’”
“That’s… really nice,” a small voice interrupted.
Discord startled, dropping the cards. He spun around. Fluttershy was standing right behind him.
Discord panicked as she looked down at the fallen cards. With a snap of his paw, they folded in the middle and flapped away, like birds.
She smiled as she watched them go. “So, um, your letter said you wanted me to come over to your house? To… talk about something?”
Discord brushed a nonexistent piece of dirt off his chest. “Well, you know, if you’re not busy...”
“There’s noplace I’d rather be.”
“WOOT!” Fireworks erupted around Discord as he squeezed his eyes shut and pumped a fist in the air. After a moment, he peeked an eye open, cleared his throat, and dispelled them. “Ah, sorry. Well then, step a little closer if you please?”
She did, and gave him a small smile that was half-obscured by her flowing pink mane. His heart beat faster at the sight of it.
He snapped his claw…
“...and here we are,” Discord said, as he and Fluttershy flashed into being on a tiny island perched within a realm of swirling purple madness. He spared a glance at the neighboring island—which was floating upside-down that day—before looking up at the peak of his nearby home’s high yellow roof with an uneasy sense of pride. “I’m glad to finally show you the place. I can’t remember the last time I had company...”
“Discord?”
He frowned at her wide-eyed expression.
She raised a hoof. “The… sky…”
He waved his paw dismissively at the insensate firmament. “It takes some getting used to, but at least there aren’t any alicorn princesses raising and lowering one thing or another on some schedule.”
She turned and studied the ground itself. “It’s an island... and that other one…”
“Well, I’ll grant you that the neighborhood has gone a bit downhill since I bought the place.”
She jumped and made an “Eep!” sound as something resembling a turquoise whale flew overhead on orange wings.
He knuckled his brow. “Maybe we should head inside?”
“Yes please,” she said, starting down the short path to his door.
He cleared his throat as he bent sideways to open it for her. “After you?”
He tried not to let his eyes linger too long on her flank as she stepped inside. Instead he looked from his white coffee table with a giant hole through the middle, to the room’s stone staircases—both of which ran upside-down—to the gnarled orange and black couch that served as the room’s only decent place to sit. He cursed under his breath, wishing he had changed it all before having her over.
Fluttershy smiled back at him. “I don’t think I understand it, but… it suits you.”
Discord blushed, turning his entire body a shade of deep crimson for a few moments. “Oh, thank you. You don’t know what it means to hear that.”
She stepped over to a small glass case hanging on the wall, holding what looked like an ancient, ragged pair of pants. “What’s this?”
He grinned and slithered over to it. “This, my dear, is my personal favorite from my ‘arts and crafts’ period a few millennia ago.”
Fluttershy bent lower, studying a metal sign below it. “‘The… Trousers of... Defenestration.’”
Discord slapped one of his knees. “A riot, every single time.” He whistled as he did an impression of a pony being hurled out of a window, then slapped his paw and claw together to signify hitting the ground.
Fluttershy frowned. “I don’t think the pony wearing them would feel that way.”
Discord’s smirk abated. “Listen, Fluttershy… that was in the past! You and your friends have shown me the… uh, magic of friendship, and…” He paused, remembering that one of his notecards had started that way. “Er, you, just you, have shown me something even more special—”
She glanced around his living room. “Was this… the only thing you made, like that?”
Discord fidgeted. “Well, no… but Celestia got most of them when she turned me to stone. I hid a few others; ones that might have been a little… ill-advised.” Discord shrugged. “We all make mistakes…?”
“That’s true.” She walked over and sat on the couch. “So, um… if it’s okay… could we talk about what you wanted to, earlier?”
“I thought you’d never ask!” He crossed to the other side of the couch. “You see, Fluttershy…”
She tilted her head. “Yes?”
He tried desperately to remember the notecards. “Well… you and I have kept up correspondence for some time now… and we’ve gotten together for tea… and our conversations…”
He paused and met her eyes again. Her lips began to curl into a tiny smile.
“Oh, I can’t do this anymore!” he shouted. “Fluttershy, what I really want to say is…”
A loud buzzing sound interrupted him. Fluttershy and Discord looked at each other in confusion. It repeated a few seconds later. “Oh, sorry, that’s me,” Discord said, reaching into a pocket that hadn’t been there a moment before. He pulled out a small pager, looked at its display, and scowled.
“What is it?”
Discord tried to psych himself out of worrying about it when she was right there… but then the pager buzzed again, and he began to worry about which item had turned up this time.
His paw and claw clenched. “I… I’m sorry… but I really…. need to get that.”
She leaned closer. “Is everything alright?”
“Of course!” he lied. He could smell the floral shampoo in her long mane, and he wanted to run a paw through it, and he hoped he still might be able to soon. “I’ve just gotta go take care of something… minor, something definitely not of any real threat to Equestria or anything. Should take about… oh, five, ten minutes, tops?”
Fluttershy settled back on the couch with a look of pure trust on her face. “Okay, I’ll just... be here.”
Discord was all smiles as he walked out of his comfortable living room, but his scowl returned as he moved out of eyeshot. He ducked into a billiard room that had appeared of its own volition during the millennium he'd been turned to stone, and snapped his paw, conjuring a wooden plinth topped by a red rotary-dial telephone. He stalked over, snatched up the phone’s receiver, and began the painstaking process of dialing the numbers from the pager one by one.
He tapped a claw against the floor as he waited for somepony to pick up. “Discord,” he said when asked his name. He rolled his eyes and craned his neck as he waited for the pony to go through their spiel. “Yes, yes, yes… but which one was it?”
He paused as the pony on the other end tried desperately to convey bad news without earning a bad customer-service-survey result.
“Well, that’s just wonderful.” He slammed the phone down and dismissed it from existence. Not for the first time did he question whether he really wanted to retain a magical monitoring service for the resting-places of his old creations.
But then he thought of Fluttershy, and her kindness, beauty… and mortality. In the wrong hooves, there were so many ways that what he’d built millennia ago could be used against her world. And that was why he retained the service.
Discord scratched his chin, pondered how he wanted to make his entrance, and flashed out of the room.