Chapter Four: With Wonder, With Terror
“Rarity? What are you doing here?”
When Rarity didn’t at first answer, Fluttershy stuttered, “Not that, I mean, I don’t want you here, or anything like that…” She scuffed a hoof against the hardwood floor, ducking behind her mane. It was still long, and still curled the same as it had been a week ago, like somecreature had tried to tie it into a bun by hand, not brush.
Rarity managed a smile. “I know you don’t, dear. And I apologize for catching you off guard like this. It’s…”
She looked past Fluttershy into the cottage. The animals were awake and eating their breakfast. Angel Bunny, noticing her standing in the doorway, looked up at her pensively. Next to him sat another bunny, a female. Rarity wondered when she’d shown up.
“Well,” Rarity continued again, “it’s a bit urgent, I suppose. Is Discord around?”
Fluttershy looked dubious. She nodded, and allowed Rarity inside.
The animals, as if sensing that some enormity was about to occur, scurried away. Rarity, for a fleeting moment, wondered if it was because they could also see more grays than she had that morning.
“He’s out in the back, teaching Mr. Bear a few tricks,” Fluttershy said. Rarity tried to ignore how tired she sounded. It might have just been the fact that the work at the animal sanctuary had increased, but then again…
They heard Discord chanting, “Okay, three-two-one, let’s go—”
Some sort of brass noise echoed out from the backyard, and when Fluttershy opened the door leading to it, they saw Discord perched on top of a small wooden stage. In front of him was Mr. Bear. He wore a top hat and a monocle, for some reason, and had his paws wrapped around the ends of a trumpet and was blowing for all he could. Rarity was no expert in bear expressions, but if she had to guess, he had a look of pure concentration.
Discord flicked his arm, and in the nearby tree, a trio of squirrels took out acorn-shaped drums and began to play them as well. Around the backyard, various animals were engaged in this display of jazz, playing brass instruments for the most part, dressed somehow in various suits and dresses that reminded Rarity of the Canterlot orchestra shows she’d see sometimes. Discord himself seemed trying to fit that mode, for he wore a straight blue leisure suit and wielded a conductor’s baton easily, but he had opted to change his hair, or rather add some: in place of the bare patches of gray, there now stood a dark-green afro.
Rarity made to call out his name, but Fluttershy placed a hoof in front of her, quieting her. They waited for the song to end.
When it did, it ended on a strong note. The trumpets and saxophones rose and rose. Mr. Bear blasted the final tune, his cheeks red with effort. Discord waved his arm, then clenched his talon into a fist, and the song finished.
“Bravo!” Discord said. He smiled toothily. “Mr. Bear, I daresay you’ve improved this practice session. Why, you may very well be able to take on the stuffy elites of Canterlot at this point!”
Mr. Bear grunted, still red-cheeked. Discord tsked. “Come now, there’s a time to be modest and there’s a time for self-celebration! And that goes for everyone, too: you were all tremendous.” He wiped a tear out of his eye, then turned. “Wouldn’t you say so, ladies?”
“Oh, yes,” Fluttershy said, also smiling. “You were all amazing. Isn’t that right, Rarity?”
“Indeed,” Rarity said, once she could find her voice. “Discord, I never knew you had an ear for conducting.”
“And the jazz?”
“It… makes sense, I think, considering who you are.”
Discord cackled. “I suppose I can accept that. Everyone!” he then called, addressing the animals once more. “Excellent session, all around. Though, squirrels, Jeff and Tom, you were a little slow on the uptake. You managed to make up for it afterwards, but do try to keep the measure, yes?” The squirrels chittered. The animals were then dispersed, taking their instruments and clothing with them to their homes.
Discord snapped his fingers, and his hair and suit vanished. Coiling around and stepping down from the platform, he faced the girls, his grin now even looking just a bit embarrassed. Another change, Rarity thought, though she could not say if that was because of his marriage or just life in general.
“As much as I’d love to assume otherwise,” Discord said, “I can’t imagine you ladies intended to come and see our jazz practice.”
Fluttershy shook her head. “Rarity said she needed to see you.”
“Is that right?” Discord leaned down and looked at her. “Well, that would be a surprise in and of itself. As I recall, you and I haven’t always seen eye to eye at times.”
“Come now, Discord, we’ve all changed.” The word tasted funny in her mouth, but she shook the taste away. It was then that she realized that Fluttershy was still present, and that she had no real tactful way of getting her to leave.
Discord was looking at her, as was Fluttershy, but evidently only the draconequus noticed the need in Rarity’s eyes. He looked at Fluttershy, and offered an apologetic grin. “I’m sorry, dear, but my gut is telling me this is a Lord of Chaos matter.”
“Oh! Yes, of course, I should have figured.”
Rarity immediately whirled on her. “Fluttershy, darling, it’s not that I don’t want you to hear, but—” She paused, then looked down. “I’ll tell you in time, I promise. But… well, I need Discord’s… unique perspective, for the moment, anyway.”
Yet Fluttershy simply smiled. “Of course, Rarity. I’ll just be in the cottage, helping the critters out of their clothes. Take as long as you need.”
And she turned and trotted back into the house before Rarity could attempt to excuse herself any further. Discord made a tittering noise. “You seem surprised by that, Rarity.”
“It’s just… I don’t know. I guess I expected—”
“That she’d be hurt? Why, Rarity, it’s as you’ve said. We’ve all changed.”
“Yes…”
They walked to the edge of the backyard, a good distance away from the cottage. Through the window, Rarity could see Fluttershy going to each animal. She seemed happy, and moreover, young. But every now and then, her mane would flash into view, and Rarity could not help but think that it was somehow fading just a bit each time.
“Rarity,” Discord said, “I may be many things, but I’m not a mind reader.”
“Right, right.” She cleared her throat. “Forgive me, Discord. But… it’s just a bit hard to formulate into words.”
Discord’s powers flashed. Now he sported a full beard, a pair of wide-brimmed spectacles, and a thick cigar. Two couches appeared out of nowhere, and Discord sat down at one. “Then just tell me whatever comes to mind,” he said in a thick accent, puffing a few smoke rings that were the same color as the clouds he’d made for Twilight.
Rarity hesitantly took the other couch. Her eyes flitted between Fluttershy’s distant form and Discord’s faux-smoking. “Today,” she began slowly, “I found a gray hair in my mane.”
Discord nodded. He looked at her from behind the spectacles, his yellow eyes big and luminous. “And that was something worth noting,” he said.
“Of course it was,” Rarity said. “Gray in purple—what pony wouldn’t make a note of that?”
“Mmhmm,” Discord murmured. He reached out to the air and pulled—again from nowhere—a clipboard and pen. He started to scribble something down. Rarity, just a tad bit curious, tried to glance at it, but Discord clicked his tongue and pulled the clipboard away. “Now, now, no peeking at my notes,” he said.
“And what did you do after finding the gray hair?” he then asked.
“Well, I… I thought about pulling it out, or even attempting to dye it and every other strand. Though that would mean going out and buying a purple dye.”
“So you thought about it. But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t. I…” A lump formed in her throat, for some reason. “I couldn’t.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know. I just… I couldn’t get rid of it in any way. It would have seemed… dishonest.”
Discord nodded, readjusting his spectacles and stroking his chin with his cigar-holding hand. “Well, it is understandable for a pony of your disposition”—he punctuated the word in such a way that Rarity gave him a slightly simmering look—“to be put off by such a thing. You know, when I first discovered my first wispy strand—” He paused, then cleared his throat. “Well, you’re not the psychologist so you don’t get to hear that particular story. But my point, my dear Rarity, is that it is completely normal to be shocked by the sight. Especially if it’s your first gray hair!”
Rarity winced. “It’s… not my first, actually.”
Discord stared at her, the pen poised midway between his hand and the clipboard. Then he harrumphed. “You know, part of the patient’s responsibility in these sessions is to be completely honest with their doctor.”
“Discord, be serious!” Rarity hissed.
“I assure you, Rarity, I am being perfectly serious. It seems you, on the other hand, are suffering from hysteria.”
“I am not hysterical!”
“Then why are you, to borrow a term, ‘freaking out’ about finding a couple of gray strands? It’s perfectly normal, you know.”
“That’s because it’s not the strands that I’m freaking out about!” Abruptly, she stood, and drew Discord close to her. She pushed his head so that he faced the cottage, and pointed with her hoof. His protest fell on deaf ears. “Look! Look at Fluttershy! You have to have seen it, since you’re literally living together!”
“If you’re talking about her posterior, I’ll have you know I am a decent draconequus.”
“Discord,” she said, choosing to deftly rush over that implication, “I am talking about the fact that she’s aging.”
She felt herself pulled away as though controlled by something else. A somewhat nauseous feeling gathered in the pit of her stomach. “She’s aging,” she said again, and then said in an even lower murmur, “we all are.”
Discord was still watching through the window. He watched as Fluttershy sashayed back and forth, tending to the animals, before she walked off to the side and away from view. He still watched.
Rarity took a shaky breath. Slowly, though she was uncertain if Discord was even listening at this point, she went back through the past several weeks of uncertainty and trepidation, speaking at length about finding the hair the first time, and the first instances she’d noticed the wrinkles on her friends’ faces while on the train to Canterlot. Then, when she started to talk about their conversation at Pony Joe’s donut shop, a clamp locked itself around her throat. She forced the words out in a voice strained with all manners of exhaustion. “We are all aging, but Twilight—she doesn’t seem to be aging. She’s as young as when she first ascended. She’s not aging in the slightest—”
Her voice hitched. She fell silent, running her hoof along the couch. But for some reason now she noticed that the kind of couch that Discord had summoned was an old and raggedy thing, with slight holes in batches, and the whole thing smelling like dusty velvet.
Rarity clenched her eyes shut. She wondered if the action would cause the faint wrinkles to darken, but she could not make herself open her eyes and see her own revelation face-to-face.
Discord nodded. Slowly, he turned away from the window. His face was long and sad, and Rarity felt her heart break. “I… I’m sorry, Discord. I didn’t…”
Didn’t what? Didn’t think this through? Didn’t realize that Discord probably knew what this meant? Didn’t think that, maybe, perhaps bringing this matter up so soon after they’d vowed to stay together and love one another for all of life and against all of death? Rarity didn’t know. And, in not knowing, she once again fell silent.
I shouldn’t have come here. She looked at Discord. He seemed to have hunched over, and fiddled with his talon and hand. I shouldn’t have said anything. I mean, I’m just a mortal pony. To be like Discord, or Princess Celestia, or, Heavens, Twilight… to be immortal… at least I will not have to face the pain of my own loss as they will. She blinked. The thought felt strangely cynical, and it scared her into a silence somehow deeper than the previous one.
Tense minutes must have passed, but Rarity never knew. She huddled against the couch. I should go. I should go and… and…
Then Discord did something she would not have expected: he began to laugh.
“You… You think this is funny?!”
“No, no! Well, maybe a little,” he said between snorts. Then he stopped—sooner than Rarity would have expected him to. “It’s just… I had that exact same thought the night before the wedding. Almost word for word, actually.”
“You did?” Rarity said, forgetting her previous disbelief.
“Rarity,” Discord said playfully, “you don’t take me for a self-absorbed idiot, do you? I practically ooze empathy at this point.”
She scrunched up her nose at that, but his attempt at humor was successful, at least insofar as disarming her own sense of shame. “The first part, maybe,” she said, low enough that he could not have heard.
“My point is, these are not new thoughts of mine. They are not new for any immortal. Celly herself, my word, I bet she has always had that sense.”
“And… Twilight?”
Here, Discord frowned. “Well, take this as you will. I don’t believe Celestia made her immortal with her ascension.”
Rarity’s hooves nearly gave out from under her.
“But alicorn ascension magic is powerful. In all likelihood, she will be aging much slower than… well, than the rest of you girls.”
“So it’s still the same,” she said bitterly. “We age, she doesn’t, or at least not as quickly, and then…”
“Are you afraid?” Discord asked suddenly.
“Of what? Dying?” Rarity almost laughed. “Discord, everypony’s afraid of dying. It’s… oh, what’s the word?” For a moment she searched, and then one came to her, one that reminded her of how Twilight might talk. “It’s the perfect antithesis to life. The end. The complete and utter rejection, or nullification, of it!” She glared at him. “But what would you know? You’re immortal. You don’t have to suffer through the fear of it.”
“No,” he said. And how he said it—how soft, how gentle, how almost kind. “I simply have to live, watching everypony else suffer themselves.”
Rarity was silent.
Discord looked around as though making sure there were no prying eyes or curious ears. Then he leaned forward, and his eyes took on their usual amused quality, twinkling. “Let me ask you something, Rarity. Do you know why I chose to marry Fluttershy?”
“If you say anything other than because you love her, Discord, I swear to Celestia no drop of immortal blood will spare you my wrath!”
“Of course it was because I love her,” he said warmly. “But let me put it this way: why, do you think, did I marry her, knowing I am immortal, and she is not?”
And Rarity, try as she might, could not provide an answer.
Discord grinned triumphantly, but still spoke with the same measure of kindness. “I asked myself that the night before the wedding. I obsessed over it, even; you have no idea how much. And, let me tell you an even greater secret.” He brought his talon forth, and closed the first and second claws together, but not all the way so as to keep them from touching. “I was this close to walking out, just because I could not answer that question.”
Rarity recovered enough to say, “But you didn’t walk out.”
“No. The next day, I went through with the wedding, kissed my Fluttershy”—here he mimed smacking lips in the air. It was not enough to make Rarity giggle, but she felt her lips tug into a half-smile—“and went, as they say, to make my own happily ever after. I did not walk out,” he said, “and I did not give up, I did not despair, for one simple reason: the fact that I am immortal…”
He snapped his fingers. For a moment, sparks flew out, and jetted into the sky, exploding into miniature fireworks. Just as quickly as they had come, they vanished. Rarity became aware, then, that it was late in the evening, and the sky was starting to turn indigo at the fringes.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Rarity looked at Discord as he stroked his chin and beard. In this way he appeared simultaneously old and young, as was fitting. “It doesn’t matter,” she reiterated.
He shook his head. “Nope. Not one bit. Not even two, if you can believe it.” He looked over his shoulder. In the window stood Fluttershy, and they could hear her softly humming to Angel Bunny and his new bunny friend. “Immortal or not immortal—does that really define anypony, truly? I don’t think so. I think it’s how you live that defines who you are. However long you’ve got—that’s not really important. Not as important as how you fill in the spaces between.”
He looked back at Rarity. “Does it scare me? Of course it does. And I’ve seen the signs, too, you know—well before you came stumbling up to the cottage. But, as I said—it doesn’t matter. When you love somepony, you don’t love them because they’ll make you live forever, Rarity. When you love somepony, you love them because they make life seem like forever.” Discord had a faint trace of red on his cheeks, but his smile betrayed the warmth in him. “That’s what I realized, anyway. And I think that’s what you need to believe, too. Even if you don’t have somepony special right now, you have to realize that there are things you can do to make this short time seem like forever.”
Rarity stared at him, at this draconequus, who had spoken so eloquently, so softly and kindly. Slowly, the tugging of her lips broke out into an actual smile. “Wow, Discord. I never imagined somepony like you could be so sentimental.”
“You call it sentimentality, I call it wisdom.”
“Gained, of course, on the eve of your wedding, in a fit of hysteria.”
“Aren’t all momentous epiphanies preceded by moments of hysteria? All the good ones, anyway.” He raised an eyebrow. “Does that make sense, though? I’m not sure if that’s what you wanted to hear…”
“No,” Rarity said. Then she clarified, “I mean, no, it makes sense. It does. I… I think it was what I needed to hear. Thank you.”
Then she hesitated. “Do… Do you think I’m silly? For thinking about this, worrying about it?”
“Silly? No, Rarity. You’re only mortal.”
She nodded. An evening wind suddenly blew through, soft and gentle, and when it rushed past it uplifted her curls, and she was certain that whatever gray hairs she had been hiding were now revealed. Discord’s eyes trailed to her head, but he said nothing.
“It’s getting late, don’t you think?” he said once the wind had left. “Come. I suppose you’ll want to head back to the Boutique.”
She nodded. They began to leave the little area in the far back, and were walking towards the cottage. Then Rarity stopped.
“I have one more question,” she said. “If you don’t mind.” When he gestured that he didn’t, she said, “How do I live, knowing all this? I mean, I love all my friends dearly, of course. But… now I know.” She fumbled to say more, but found that no more words could be added. She looked at the draconequus and waited.
He neared the door. He paused, one hand reaching for the knob. “Gracefully, Rarity,” he finally said, just as he opened the door. “You have to live gracefully.”
Fluttershy heard them and welcomed them back in. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” Rarity said, but the word was hollow and obvious.
Fluttershy looked pointedly at Discord as though he had some doing in it. Rarity almost explained everything that had happened, but then found she could not. There were too many thoughts in her head. Too many emotions fluttering about in her heart. Enough to last a lifetime, if she was not careful.
“Next week is our spa date, right?” she said. Fluttershy nodded. “In that case, I’ll tell you about it then.”
Rarity trotted to the front door. She stopped again, feeling Fluttershy’s questioning gaze worm its way up her neck. Rarity turned. Over her shoulder she saw age lines more clearly, as though the evening light amplifying them against Fluttershy’s coat. She saw the tiredness in her. She saw the aging.
She looked at Discord. And she smiled. “Thank you, Discord.”
With that, she trotted out into the night.
***
That night she took out the box holding the first strand of hair. She held it up against the moonbeams and examined its every dimension. It glistened like a tear, or maybe like a node of quartz. It was hard to tell, but maybe it was both.
When she put the box away, she did not bother replacing the hair back in it. It fell onto the desk. A stray breeze came through the window, took it in its arms, and carried it out into the world.
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Yet another wonderful chapter! Congratulations on making ‘featured’ again! Looking forward to your next chapter!
10305651
Thank you! Without your help, this story would not have been as lovely as it's now portrayed. So, really, you deserve as much credit as me.
I really liked this quote. You also have a wonderful knack for description, and I'm really enjoying this one. Excited to read more!
10305851
Thank you! We've got one more chapter left, but I'm glad you're enjoying the story!