Devil May Care

by horizon

4. Moon

Far past the high school — past the city center and the suburbs and the ranches and the farms — a small highway winds into the verdant foothills and up to the isolated mountain town of Dream Valley. On the slopes overlooking the town, there's a house at 206 Harmony Ridge Drive. From its enormous front picture window, you can see the land roll away, emerald green out to the shimmering sapphires of distant seas.

Discord appears in the middle of the spacious living room with an incongruous honk, and looks around Human Celestia's home.

Its state is best described as the halfway point between tidy and cluttered. The only bare surface in sight is the drab gray wall-to-wall carpet. Endtables and bookshelves and filing cabinets support a sea of artifacts from two lives and half a dozen colliding interests — but they're at a comfortable density, and neatly segregated into their own designated regions. The walls by the stairs are a patchwork tableau of photographs: sisters, light and dark, apart and together, frozen amid various happy memories. On the opposite wall, there's an oil-paint landscape of the Milky Way glimmering over a dark field of flowers (and Luna's signature), next to a medieval tapestry depicting the end of some long-ago war (clearly a refugee from some drafty Bittish castle). In the corner is a desk with a large Macintosh computer sitting next to a number of framed desktop photos.

His attention is immediately drawn there. Front and center is a picture of Principal Celestia's star valedictorian, bacon hair wild in spring wind, her five best friends crowding in in a group hug. He reaches past that, and a royal wedding photo — Celestia and some natty noble, both hilariously overdressed, eyes fixed past the camera in thousand-yard stares — to a small frame with two figures in a meadow. A laughing Celestia, eyes blazing with life, is holding the camera up for a selfie, while behind her, sitting meekly on a picnic blanket and staring forward uncertainly, is —

"Darrell?" a voice mumbles from above and behind him.

Discord clenches his fingers so hard the glass covering the photo cracks.

"Discord," he says flatly as he turns around.

Luna is standing in the upstairs hall — or, at least, a sad human parody of her. Her hair is a drab shade of light blue that the real Luna only ever had when the Elements of Harmony blasted all her power away. She's dressed in a dark blue bathrobe, hanging loosely around her thin frame, and underneath matted hair her eyes are dark with exhaustion.

Their eyes meet — and something in his look makes her jerk back from the railing. One hand flies to her chest, clutching the robe's collar. The other flattens against the wall as she staggers backward a step. All the color drains from her face.

"Please don't kill me," she says in a very small voice.

Discord blinks, thrown out of his anger. "Kill?" he snorts. "You know who I am, yet you think I'm here to kill? I don't know whether to be offended or amused." He stares at this sniveling figure, a sheep to Princess Luna's wolf — yet more proof that absolutely nothing of value will be lost when this world is erased. "Pity. Let's go with pity."

Pathetic Human Luna stands frozen for a moment. "All I know about you is what the other me said," she finally ventures. "Which is that Discord wants to destroy this world."

Now that piques his interest. "Moon Moon's here?"

"No, she and I just talked in a dream." Luna swallows and laughs shakily. "Now there's something I never thought I'd say. Oh — um. She had a message for you."

Discord's instantly suspicious. Princess Luna is legendarily subtle and cunning; he knows from experience just how dangerous listening to her is. But she's probably also betting that going to these lengths to talk at him will make him too curious to refuse — and that's a bet no bookie would go against. "Alright," he says. "Let's hear it."

Human Luna nods and steadies herself. "She wants you to know that they expect to have a way by moonrise to reopen the portal and bring you back. You're not stuck here. There's no need for anything drastic."

Discord laughs. "How adorable! She thinks I'm panicking." There's a little twitchy feeling near the bottom of his stomach, though — despite the topic coming up several times, he never considered the long-term implications of the portal being broken, and he doesn't want to think about how he would have taken that realization. "And if that was why I was going to destroy the world, that might have made a difference. Was there anything else?"

"I think so." Human Luna squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, searching her memory. "Oh, right. She and Princess Celestia also realize that destroying the portal was an accident. They're not upset at you."

"Strike two," Discord says. "Also not doing this to hide the evidence." Though, admittedly, that does sound exactly like something he'd do. "What's her third pitch?"

"That was all I got," Luna says. "We didn't have time for anything else. She had to spend a few minutes introducing herself and explaining the situation. Then your arrival woke me up from my nap."

Discord can't help but laugh. "Sleeping through the invasion! Some things never change."

Luna looks at him in confusion, then stands a little straighter and cinches her bathrobe more tightly closed. "What are you doing here, anyway? She thought you'd be in town."

Discord freezes. Whips his hands behind his back. Kicks the trash can out from underneath Celestia's desk, and drops the photo in it with the world's subtlest crash. "Nothing that's as important to you as my destroying the world," he parries. "Shouldn't you be trying to talk me out of that?"

She studies him in a way that reminds him a great deal of her better half. "If the immortal pony goddess version of me couldn't," she says slowly, "I don't think I've got much chance."

Discord frowns. "Not with an attitude like that, you don't." He throws his arms wide. "Will you have some pride in yourself? At least give it a shot. I'd like to think that there's something in this universe that isn't an insult to Equestria."

She lets out a long breath. "I guess I can try. First of all, is that why you're out to destroy us? We don't measure up to your standards?"

"For your information," he says, putting his hand to his chest, "as much as I'd love to take the moral high ground on that, there's a more different moral high ground that's even more important. Namely, this world is a fake shadow copy of Equestria which only exists by eating its magic, and I can't let it threaten the world I love."

Luna's silent for a while.

"Well," she finally says. "That certainly explains a lot."

Discord raises an eyebrow. "For the record, that isn't how talking me out of the apocalypse is supposed to go."

Luna walks slowly over to the stairs and sits down on the top step. "I think you're right, though. I mean … magic suddenly becomes real just in time for our students to become friends with a transformed pony from another dimension, and then my sister shares a dream with an alternate me who got banished to the moon for a thousand years … and then magical princess-goddess me writes to tell me I'm an inspiration to her? I can't deny the evidence of my senses, but a world that's real doesn't work that way."

"See, that's what I've been saying!" Discord says. "Except, you know, with less detail. And I haven't been saying it. But there's something about this place that doesn't add up." On impulse, he adds: "So what do you think? Why is this world filled with My Little Clonies?"

"Well, if we're fake —" she says without a hint of hesitation, as if it's something she's given far too much thought to — "I think maybe this is a dream-world filled with what Equestria's goddesses wish they could be, in their heart of hearts. Celestia wants a fresh start. To leave behind her responsibilities instead of needing to raise the sun every day, and be able to focus again on helping her subjects grow and learn. Twilight Sparkle wants to be innocent again — get out from under all the pressure she must have been thrust into when she became a princess. Her local copy was just an average, unassuming student over at Crystal Prep until that whole mess with the Friendship Games. And the other version of me …" Her voice softens. "She's holding onto an unhealthy amount of guilt."

"There is nothing about Human Me which I wish for," Discord says, keeping his voice extremely flat.

Luna hesitates for a fraction of a second at his tone, but she's on a roll. "Speaking of which — that's the other half, the straight-up inconsistencies. As soon as Pony Me mentioned that Darrell was a copy of you, I began to wonder why I hadn't noticed that his wedding to Celestia was the same week I remember Celestia and I being on vacation at Mount Rushmare. And he and Celestia were supposedly good childhood friends, but I don't remember him ever visiting our house, or ever seeing him in grade school. The more I think about him, the more unreal everything feels."

Discord snorts — actually impressed. "Do you know you're the first person I've talked to so far who's even noticed that?"

"In my job, you have to have both a high tolerance for weirdness and a keen nose for it." Luna smiles wryly and makes a vague hand gesture. "So is that the big evidence that we're fakes?"

"Actually, no. He Who Must Not Be Named is an entirely different sort of unreal than your world is. Harmony jerry-rigged a local duplicate of me together after Order botched the job, but Harmony couldn't cleanly rewrite everyone's memories on the fly."

She has to process that one for a moment.

"I see," Luna says, tone dry as chalk. "That is definitely a normal thing to say, which happens all the time in conversations in the real world."

"You'd be surprised. Ponies used to have entire schools of magic devoted to memory manipulation before Celestia got on her high horseshoes and banned the lot."

Her eyebrows shoot up. "… Oh."

"I should also note," Discord adds, "you're taking that revelation a lot better than most ponies do."

"I haven't had a lot of time to think about it yet," Luna says. "Magic isn't upending my life the way it is with the kids. Up until I met Pony Me in a dream half an hour ago, it was something that happened to other people." She sighs and says quietly, "I guess I won't get a lot of time to think about it, either."

Despite his first impressions, Discord's been unexpectedly warming up to this poor little broken human — and he can feel hope stirring. Maybe she's a good enough copy of Real Luna to give him a run for his money.

"Talk me out of this, then," he prods.

"Sure." Luna shrugs. "I don't want to die."

A flicker of irritation creeps back in. "Yes," he says flatly. "We established that back at the beginning. What I want is your best argument against my plan."

"That's the argument, though." She looks him directly in the eye. "You're not a bad person, Discord. It sounds like you're looking for a reason not to do this. And that is: whether we're real or not, you shouldn't let yourself become someone who can listen to a person say, 'I don't want to die,' and then end them anyway."

That stops him cold.

It's breathtaking. It's like a verbal Stare. It's the first time that anybody but Fluttershy has made a moral argument that he's wanted to consider. Discord flails ineffectually for a counterargument … until he remembers that she admitted having just talked to Princess Luna.

Moon Moon is the undisputed master of getting inside opponents' heads — so there has to be some trick here. He doesn't know what it is, but given the power of the argument, Human Luna had to have been coached. Moon Moon must have walked her through every single word of the argument. No — every gesture, every tactic, starting with making him sympathize with her at the start.

Which means everything she's said is a lie. "Woke me up from my nap"? "No time for anything else"? Ha! How could they expect him to forget that Luna and Celestia manage opposite halves of the sky? This human must have gone to sleep at moonset when her job ended, and been planning how to trick him ever since!

With that established, it's a lot more comfortable to ignore her point and fall back on his own facts. "That's true if you're a person," he says. "But that's exactly the question here. Should you feel guilty when you're watching a movie, and then you turn it off at the end? Have you killed anyone then? And what if staying obsessed with that movie is distracting your real friends from real problems?"

"Turning off a movie doesn't end its world."

"It's an analogy!" he snaps. "You know what I mean! You're not real, and they are!" Discord crosses his arms. "I'm doing this for them. And I have to do this for them, because none of them is going to."

Luna frowns — then her face falls back into a gentle sort of neutrality (as hard to read as the real one's more aggressively blank mask), and she gives him a shrug. "It's not just ignorance on their part. The ponies are going to great lengths to save us, and they wouldn't do that if your argument was as airtight as you think it is. You should talk to them directly before you do anything you might regret."

"It's a little late for that," Discord growls. "They've already been bamboozled by He Who Must Not Be Named." He folds his arms. "They'll understand, anyway. They'll have to, when they hear I'm going by the word of Harmony."

Now she just looks confused. "That's the second time you've used that name. Should it mean anything to me?"

Discord sighs, his hopes crumpling. Even after realizing that this pathetic clone's effectiveness came from being coached in great detail by Moon Moon, he could still have enjoyed matching wits with a princess by proxy. But catching Human Luna up on the basic context necessary for an argument is quite beyond his tolerance for drudgework.

"I guess not," he says. "Anyway, I suppose I should thank you for trying." He pauses for a moment, then yields to pity and adds: "For what it's worth, I'm sorry you got the short end of the existential stick here. You really did deserve a world better than this."

Luna opens her mouth to respond. Her expression scrunches up, and she stares at him, calculating — and for a fraction of a second, it feels again like he might be able to match wits with the goddess she's imitating —

Then she deflates all at once, slumping back against the stairway wall, extinguishing his hopes for good.

"Oh," she manages, in a small voice. "Um. Thanks."

Sheesh. Discord has kicked puppies who made him feel less bad about winning their dispute.

Awkward silence stretches out for a moment. "Right," Discord says, and raises his fingers to snap. "Ta."

"Will it hurt?" Luna suddenly says.

Discord frowns. "I'm not cruel."

She looks back up at him with a subdued expression. "I know. But are you sure of what it'll actually feel like? Have you done this before?"

"No, but —" he hesitates, then narrows his eyes. "We're done arguing. You already had your chance to make me feel guilty."

A frown flickers past her features, almost too quick to see, and then she sighs. "That's not it," she protests. "My world's about to end. I just want to know what to prepare for."

"Ah," Discord says, letting himself give in to pity again. "Well, when I had a front-row seat to Tirek draining the magic from ponies, they just stopped caring. So I imagine by the time the world ends, it simply won't matter."

She nods uncertainly. "Where are you going to do it? Will I be able to see it coming?"

"Down at the school." He points through the big picture window, and is about to cut conversation off when Luna barks out a short, sharp laugh.

"It figures," she says. "Everything always comes back to that. Why there, out of curiosity?"

"Because that's where the portal to Equestria that I'm going to detach from the world is." Discord's pity only goes so far; he has no patience with this kid-level stuff. "Are we done here? Don't you have some —" he makes a vague gesture, and feels his tone turn a little more bitingly sarcastic than he had intended — "loved ones to call, so you can say the tragic, overwrought, weepy goodbyes that will tug at my heartstrings and make me change my mind?"

"Well," Luna says dryly, pulling a cell phone from her bathrobe pocket, "I was going to wait until after you left to start dialing, but if you do feel like waiting around and being convinced —"

Discord snorts. "Have fun with that," he says, and snaps before she can say anything else.

---

There's an obvious, and smart, place for him to go next. Nothing's going to change his mind at this point; he ought to head directly to the portal, do not pass Go, and get this mess over with.

But there's smart, and then there's satisfying. And right now, that guilt trip from Pathetic Human Luna is hitting a little too close to home. He needs to get that out of his system first. And there's no better way to do that than some good old-fashioned gloating.

"Harmony!" he crows to the birch tree. "How's it going, you old sap."

"The wheel is come full circle," the tree's lips gravely intone. "I am here."

"As if you'd leaf at a time like this." Discord struts up to the tree, grinning. "I've been having the most gloriously unlucky day."

The tree displays no hint of emotion. "As if that luck, in very spite of cunning, bade him win all."

"That's the plan," Discord says with an exaggerated bow. "Thank you so much for clarifying things with your earlier advice, by the way. I've got to say I like this new side of you. Who'd have ever thought you'd be the one helping me set things right by blowing up the world?"

"To do a great right," the tree says, "do a little wrong … and curb this cruel devil of his will."

Discord isn't sure what to make of that last addition for a moment. Then he barks out a laugh. "Hah! Yes, I suppose you have used me the same way you always use everyone. Good of you to admit it. But we'll talk about your manipulation later — right now we've got a world to destroy." He thinks for a moment, strikes a little pose in front of the mouth, and adds, "Mare lips, mare lips on the wood, will our plans go as they should?"

Discord isn't sure it's possible for a tree to hesitate — but this one certainly seems to pause for longer than usual before the lips open again.

"We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars," it says, "as if we were fools by heavenly compulsion."

Discord stands there, rigid, for a moment, then lunges forward and rips the lips off the bark. "Who asked you?!" he roars, flinging them to the ground.

There's no response.

"You know what?" he shouts. "I don't need you! I'm perfectly capable of destroying the world on my own. I've already come far closer than you ever did! And if Sunflanks and Moon Moon want to make a fool out of me … well … they're just going to have to come here and try it to my face!"

The lips begin to shrivel, turning grey, as the magic animating them dissipates. He sticks his tongue out.

Discord's never been much of a thinker. But as he's standing there seething at Harmony, he can't help but think. The thing is: the portal's broken, and all of the princesses are stuck on the Equestrian side. But unless there's a way for Celestia and Luna to directly oppose him — and thus, be the ones to blame for any hypothetical disasters — what Harmony said made no sense. (Which is bad. Not making sense is his job.)

How could Celestia and Luna possibly ruin his plans?

The question lingers for a moment. Yromem, as usual, completely fails to be helpful.

Then Discord pauses. A smile begins to curl back onto his face.

He's overthinking this. There's a simple way of finding out.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

I think maybe this is a dream-world filled with what Equestria's goddesses wish they could be, in their heart of hearts.

And there's the counterpoint. After all, it's not like the sirens know the princessipals that well.

And a noble effort by VP Luna, but changing Discord's mind better than he can is always an uphill struggle.

[Ri2]

Human Twilight is mentioned, but isn't one of Sunset's best friends? Luna said 'five' not six.