Chapter 6: The Voice of Reason
Wind Whistler stood looking at Discord for what seemed a very long time.
Discord shifted uncomfortably before her gaze. He should not have felt uncomfortable, of course: he was a Draconequus, a God of Chaos, a manifestation of Nature's Fury. She was just the ghost of a Pony, preserved within what was now his mind. He was the victor, the master here.
Nevetheless, he felt uncomfortable.
Perhaps this had been because, for the first two decades of his life, she had been his teacher. His teacher, and of course that of the two Sisters, but then they had always gotten on well with her. He, on the other hand, had always been the bad colt of the classroom, the one who would act up and do something stupid (something that, half the time, would make the Sisters laugh, which was of course one of the big reasons he did them) but which would annoy Wind Whistler.
Corporal punishment was not the way of the Ponies of Paradise Estate. And Wind Whistler needed no such crude methods of discipline. She could simply fix one with such a stare, such a look of stern disapproval ... it wasn't a psychic Stare, like that of ... somepony else ... but it didn't need to be. It reduced one to a quivering mass of guilt.
Celestia had learned that look, copied it, practiced it. That look had helped her rule a subcontinental-sized empire.
Wind Whistler had the original model.
"Why am I here?" he asked rhetorically. "I'm here because I'm thinking of killing somepony, that's why." There. That established his seriousness, that he was no longer a schoolcolt in her class!
"Then why don't you simply kill that pony?" Wind Whistler asked, quirking her lips and putting her ears forward slightly. "Surely that's not so difficult for something as mighty as yourself?" Her voice was utterly deadpan. "And killing ponies has always worked out so very, very well for you ..."
"It's not that simple," Discord explained, twisting and turning his long body in a way which would have unnerved almost anypony else.. "It used to be that simple, but then everything changed."
"What changed everything?" Wind Whistler asked him.
"She changed everything," Discord replied. "If I kill him, she'll get mad at me." He pouted. "Which shouldn't matter to me, because she betrayed me anyway." His face fell. "But it does matter," he said from the floor. "It does."
"Pick that up!" said Wind Whistler sternly, pointing with one hoof at his fallen face.
He stuck out his tongue at her, but reached down, gathered up his face and re-attached it to the front of his head.
"Now," asked Wind Whistler, "shall I assume that by 'her', you mean the High Lady Fluttershy Wind?" She gestured with her hoof, and a glowing three-dimensional image of Fluttershy appeared, rotating slowly to show her from every point of view.
Discord smiled briefly at the hologram of her, his face softening. Before it could run like wax off his head, he remembered that he was mad at her, and scowled. "Yes," he confirmed. "Her."
"Do you love her?" Wind Whistler asked him directly.
"Love her?" Discord snorted. "Don't be ridiculous. Love her? I'm Discord!" he shouted. Lightning flashed, thunder rumbled. "I've crushed nations under my feet!" He looked at those appendages. "Well, not literally, unless they were very large feet. Or very small nations. Or I guess I could do it one footprint at a time, but then it would take me a very long time ..."
"Discord!" snapped Wind Whistler.
His eyes jerked forward to meet hers.
She blinked in irritation, drew her head back, and pushed the eyeballs on the end of their stalks out of contact with her own orbs.
"Do," she repeated slowly, "you love her?"
"No!" he said. "Not really. Well, maybe. Perhaps. A bit. Yes," he finally admitted, making it sound as if he were admitting to some shameful weakness.
"Well then. You love her."
Discord nodded.
"And by 'him,' I suspect you mean Bulk Biceps." She made another gesture, and a hologram of his hated rival appeared, also glowing and rotating slowly.
Discord hissed, his eyes shooting daggers at the image. Fortunately for Wind Whistler, she had expected some such reaction from him, and had been careful to stand well clear of the line of fire. The daggers kept on going until they shunked into one of the room's walls.
"I'll take that as confirmation," she continued drily. "So, you hate him?"
"Yes," said Discord.
"You want to hurt him?"
"Yes," snarled Discord.
"You want to kill him?"
"Yes!" roared Discord,
"Why?" asked Wind Whistler.
"Why?" asked Discord in confusion. He stopped, scratched his head for a moment, then practically wailed "Because he's making time with my filly!"
"Ah," said Wind Whistler. "Now we get to the heart of the matter."
"I'd like to get to his heart," said Discord, extending the claws on his lion paw to their full length. "Get to it and rip it out and ..."
"Hush," said Wind Whistler. "We're being rational here."
"Oh, all right," grumbled Discord.
"Now, when you say your filly .... bear with me, I'm not always up on your newfangled customs, things were simpler in my day ..."
In point of fact, it had been Wind Whistler herself who had first adapted the Human marital codes to Pony purposes, writing out lengthy descriptions of them in the first place, in the days when the Reclamation had begun and the Ponies had begun living in towns and cities again, both sexes mingled together instead of separating into sedentary Mare and nomadic Big Brother herds. But Discord let this pass -- he was familiar with her teaching methods.
"Is she your wife?" asked Wind Whistler.
"Well, no," Discord said. "I disapprove of marriage on philosophical grounds, you see ..."
"Your betrothed?"
"Of course not," said Discord in some annoyance. "Why would I betroth to somepony if I disapprove of the concept of marriage?"
"Your acknowledged exclusive lover?"
"No," admitted Discord. "We hadn't quite made things exclusive ..."
"Your regular non-exclusive lover?"
"Well, no ..."
"Have you ever mated with her?"
"Not precisely ..."
"Have you ever made love with her short of full physical intercourse?"
"Well, we've been taking things slow ..."
"Have you kissed her?"
"Yes!" said Discord, glad to finally be able to answer in the affirmative to one of these maddening questions.
Wind Whistler fixed him with her gaze..
"Just ... not on the lips," he admitted.
Wind Whistler sighed in frustration.
"Have you ever told her that you love her?" she asked him, her voice surprisingly gentle.
Discord suddenly found his own fore members very fascinating, twiddling the talons with the lion's claws.
"Well, as a friend ..."
"Discord, what exactly do you have or do with Fluttershy that causes you to imagine that you have the right to kill any rival for her affections?" asked Wind Whistler.
"Well," he replied. "I come over for her house for tea. And she serves me these really nice little cakes. And I watch her tend her animals ... she's so maternal with them, and she never hurts them ..." his eyes got misty. His relationship with his own incarnate mother had been a bit strained, at the end, after she broke free of his mind control. "And then we take walks, and have long conversations about how life works and how the animals and plants live together. And sometimes we'll go off somewhere far away together, and I'll make new species for her, or show her some new ideas about weather or matter and sometimes she thinks I'm really clever and she tells me so and I feel ... happy ... it makes me feel really good when she likes what I make ..."
"I ... see ..." said Wind Whistler, screwing her features up in concentration.
"And sometimes," Discord continued, "when we have a really good day, we'll just lie there talking and she'll sort of cuddle up into my coils, and she's so warm and soft and fuzzy and yellow and pink and cute, like some kind of living plush toy only better because I know it's my friend in there, and she's not afraid of me at all, she'll just go to sleep against me, and I can imagine that I'm ... well ... something else, something she'd have no reason to be afraid of, and that we could be like this forever and ever ... well, not literally, it would get boring, but for a long while and we could do this again and again instead of me betraying and destroying her like I know I will in the end ..."
"Why?" asked Wind Whistler gently.
"Why what?"
"Why will you betray and destroy her in the end?"
"Well, it's what I do, isn't it?" said Discord. "I mean I can have fun with my toys for a while, but eventually they always break or wear out. And they're just toys, in the end. They're not real, like me. And betrayal and destruction are fun -- they're all part of the game."
"You contradicted yourself, you know."
"I do that a lot," Discord said. "It's who I am. I'm Chaos. I'm free. I can't be tied down by laws and morality and nonsense like that -- that's a restriction on my soul. That's slavery."
"So you have to betray and destroy those whom you love?" asked Wind Whistler.
"Of course," said Discord. "I betrayed and destroyed you, didn't I? And everypony else in my family. Except for the ones who betrayed and destroyed me."
Wind Whistler blinked.
"You're supposed to be the smart one, after all," Discord continued. "Can't you see the pattern?"
"Yes," said Wind Whistler. "I can see it clearly. And that's the contradiction."
"What is?" asked Discord.
"You claim to love Fluttershy," Wind Whistler explained. "To enjoy her company. You claim that she makes you happy."
"So?"
"And you claim that you will betray and destroy her in the end," added Wind Whistler.
"And?"
"Why must you?" asked Wind Whistler.
"Eh?"
"If you want to keep her around you, as your friend, then just don't betray and destroy her. If you 'must' betray and destroy her, then aren't you accepting the imposition of an external rule over yourself, limiting yourself? A restriction on your soul. Slavery."
"You don't understand," Discord said. "You've never understood." He sighed. "You're just one Aspect -- the ghost of an Aspect -- and so am I, but I'm an Aspect of something very much larger. I have to be the way I am. If I change too much ... deviate too much ... I could ..." He shuddered. "You wouldn't understand."
"You're afraid that you will be rejected by your Cosmic Self," said Wind Whistler calmly. "Your memories extracted for the use of the greater Discord, and your personality -- everything you've become since your entry into the mortal plane -- deleted and destroyed, or at best kept in compressed storage for the occasional simulation, never to be free in the real world again."
Discord gaped at her in astonishment.
"I've been living inside you for twenty-five hundred years," she said. "I've read the books in my library. You know that, Discord. That's why you come to me for advice in the first place."
"Well you should be afraid too," said Discord shortly. "Something went out of you when I took your body," he pointed out. "I think it was your soul. You may be just a copy, attached to me, and if that's the case, then if I'm deleted, you will be too."
"Why should I be afraid?" Wind Whistler asked. "Of deletion?"
"Because you won't be!" said Discord. "You'll cease to exist."
"But if I let fear change me into something I'm not," pointed out Wind Whistler, "something the me I am now would despise, isn't that also 'ceasing to exist?' I'd rather not let fear rule me like that."
"Now you're just being philosophical."
"Philosophy is important," said Wind Whistler. "We're governed by our assumptions, whether we acknowledge them or not."
"I'm entirely free," insisted Discord.
"That's what you choose to believe." Wind Whistler sighed. "Very well. Do you really want my advice?"
"That's why I'm here," said Discord.
"If you do anything to harm Bulk Biceps, you will lose any chance you ever had of winning Fluttershy's love of her own free choice," said Wind Whistler. "At best you will acquire Fluttershy as a highly-reluctant slave, and only for a while. At worst, you will either destroy the world for the last time ..."
"Last time?" asked Discord. "That sounds terribly final ..."
"Another big battle between you and the Sisters could wreck the geocentric mini-cosmos you three formed around the Earth four thousand years ago. You've already put it under tremendous strain. You'll crack the continuum even more severely. And the Night Shadows are waiting to swarm in and devour all life on this world."
"Night Shadows!" Discord laughed, waved his lion paw scornfully at the air. "That's a lie, told by the Powers That Be the better to oppress us!"
"I don't know which Powers you mean," replied Wind Whistler, "since as far as I can tell neither Nature's Fury nor Nature's Law seems to be responding competently to their existence, or doing much of anything other than squabbling unproductively -- I think you're both being betrayed by a mole. But have it your way. No Night Shadows." She glared at him as if she would say something more, then returned to her original point.
"If you fight the Sisters again, either you'll win, or they'll win, or you'll break the world between you, in which case you all lose. If you win, you get Fluttershy the way that you had Shady -- as your mind-slave. You won't really enjoy that."
"How do you know that?" asked Discord.
"Because of everything else you told me," answered Wind Whistler. "You want her love, her approval. Hers, not that of a meat puppet wearing her face. If that was all it took to satisfy you, then you just would have created a simulacrum of her in your private world instead of going through all this drama.
"If you lose --" Wind Whistler continued.
"Oh, please --" laughed Discord. "Like I could lose!" He held high a gold statue of himself which was inscribed 'Discord: #1 Winner', and made a victory pose, while confetti and streamers rained down on him from above.
One of the streamers fell across Wind Whistler's nose. She wiped it off with irritation.
"Says the Draconequus who spent fifteen hundred years as a statue decorating Celestia's garden," Wind Whistler pointed out. "I rather enjoyed it. I had time to read, and work on my model. Did you enjoy it?"
Discord scowled.
"And if you break the world ..." said Wind Whistler. "Well, you'll be free. You wouldn't even have to go back to the Cosmic level to suffer the vengeance of your Family," she pointed out. "Just wander the Universe as your present Aspect, alone and lonely, going slowly mad ... the only species with whom you can emotionally identify forever gone ... that's not too bad, now is it?"
Discord's scowl grew deeper.
"And of course none of those outcomes get you Fluttershy," Wind Whistler added. "Not as you really want her. As your beloved friend."
"Enough!" shouted Discord. "You've made your point." He held up and waved a small white flag. "What can I do?"
Wind Whistler smiled.
Her eyes were unreadable.
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Oh. That was fast.
So, Discord's betrayal really is inevitable. If it weren't, then he wouldn't be Him. Well, that's a nasty bind. And if the destruction is also required, then this can't be solved by a quick spin in the Heel-Face Revolving Door. On the other hand, "destroy" still offers some flexibility. After all, Twilight was reduced to a cutie-mark-shaped smear, and she came out alright.
Wind Whistler's intelligence is frankly a bit frightening. She even sussed out the actions of the Black Pharaoh. As such, I eagerly look forward to seeing her solution to the problem.
4490657
My Luna is definitely the "tomboy" of the two Sisters on the Tomboy and Girly-Girl axis of description, but she's got her own weird sense of feminine style which revolves mostly around really cool military gear. I went into this a little in the part of All the Way Back, with my vehicular and weapons porn about the Midnight Chariot and Luna's portable arsenal.
4490898 Clearly he has to corrupt her into a state where betraying her won't cost him her friendship.
Sort of like Lina Inverse and Xellos. Lina was even still arguably a good guy.
...I think he'd have a better shot at having that sort of relationship with Twilight, though.
Discord technically treated Shady very well, but her pleads fell on deaf ears in the POV Universe. Discord loved his pony mother, but that became twisted when his full personality awakened. The sad part is that in the end he still cared about her.
4491544
I know. It just didn't work out so well for Discord.
And yes, it's mean of Wind Whistler to bring it up. But consider the circumstances.
And her bigger point is that hideously evil behavior is very alienating. Which most Ponies, even hideously evil ones, would sort of grasp. But this is Discord.
4491453
Are you kidding? Twilight would never forgive a betrayal like...
...oh, wait... :-)
4491733
Twilight is very forgiving. Luna less so. This is going to cause problems between them later in this story.
4491548
I wonder if Discord ever met his half-sister (Baby Shady) in this timeline.
4493238
In yours he only meets her when he's being punished by his fellow Cosmics, right?
4494453
That was due to him INSERTING himself forcibly into reality, that caused Shady II to live two lifetimes at once eons apart.
4494530
Did he basically displace Shady the Younger, then? By being born? And if so, did Celestia and Luna displace anypony?
4494751
Luna and Celly did not. And the bug is that Shady was technically born BEFORE Discord in the pony pov series universe, but his arrival somehow retconed her to being born eons later by her mother.
4494873
Ah, I see. So Shady II was born in the second continuty after Discord was frozen in stone, but still had memories of the first continuity, then?
4495031
Yeah. The BUG in the time stream is that BOTH of Shady's lives still technically happened, but Discord had become Shady's only child when he forced himself in.
I assume this confusing bit of mishmash didn't happen in this reality.
I think it might have been interesting how things would have played out different if he had a big sister in this timeline.
This is very much the way I see Discord's feelings for Fluttershy (albeit your interpretation is much darker). He's chaos incarnate- he believe it is INEVITABLE that he will screw everything up.
Gotta say I'm really enjoying this so far. I wonder if Wind Whistler gained knowledge of Cosmic rules and events before or after she was absorbed by Discord.