Episode tag/companion to "Discordant Harmony". Written in second person for some inexplicable reason. In the course of trying to make sure Fluttershy is impressed by his tea party, Discord discovers some things. Some of them are good things. Some of them are very much not.
After the Tirek incident, you were tormented for months by the fear that you might do something that spectacularly stupid and harmful to your friends again. You tried getting yourself turned to stone again, but your friends put a stop to that, and convinced you it was a bad idea anyway. But you were still afraid, because you do stupid things all the time. That's part of what it means to be Chaos. You can't possibly think through all the potential consequences of everything you do, because if you did that, it wouldn't be chaos. Still, after you royally piss off Fluttershy by getting overly jealous of her new friend, you're tormented once again by nightmares of alienating all your friends and losing them, or alternately of being too subservient to what they want or what Celestia wants and losing yourself. It gets to the point where you actually need to break down and accept help from Luna if you're ever going to get any sleep again.
Finally, you remember the technique Pinkie uses, that she told you about years ago, when you were first let out of stone. She splits off tiny portions of herself to be non-chaotic, and has them live in her head, doing the jobs they need to do because Pinkie doesn't have an infinite supply of chaos magic and needs to employ things like logic and preparation to make what she wants to happen, happen. You've always made copies of yourself, but generally they're either remote puppets that you're controlling, low-intelligence programmed constructs designed to wield your power in specific ways you've pre-defined, or you've literally split your consciousness into two bodies and your single ego is operating both bodies equally. You've never tried to literally make an aspect of your own personality into an alternate self with its own mind, like Pinkie did, and when she first told you about that the thought terrified you.
For a creature of Chaos there is a lot of stuff inside you that you prefer to repress or redirect. You pride yourself that you're not evil, just chaotic, and that anypony who called you evil just hates chaos... but there are impulses within you that could be evil, if you let them be. You don't like the face of chaos represented by war and destruction and death, but it's part of chaos and it's in you as much as all of the more wondrous parts of chaos are, and if you'd made Discords to represent parts of you that you yourself don't want to be, wouldn't they end up being those darker parts? And then you'd have to fight your evil alter ego and that never ends well.
But now, you realize, there is a part of you that you would rather externalize into another self. There's a part of you that cares so much about Fluttershy, and to a lesser extent your other friends, that you'd give up chaos if you had to... and you don't want to give up chaos or even think about it, but that part exists. That's the part that tried to have you locked away in stone so you couldn't harm your friends, the part that causes your recurring nightmares of screwing everything up and losing them. You don't want to be that part of you because that's where the other nightmares come in, the ones where Celestia has you working as an accountant or where Twilight is making you sort books for her and you lose your powers and your self and sometimes in the dream you feel like you're fading out of reality. But that part of you needs to exist and have a voice, but it can't be the boss of you either.
So you make Specs. Your first fully realized Other Discord, the way Pinkie has her Other Pinkies. You give him glasses to distinguish him from you, and you make his primary mission to think not about chaos but about your friends and how to keep them. You know yourself to be smart, cunning, manipulative and quite capable of using logic if it suits you; you just don't like it. You don't like to coldly reason things out because that's not chaos and you feel like if you did that all the time you'd lose yourself. So Specs by his very nature is less powerful than you; he can't wield chaos to full effect and take you over or control you, because he's not nearly as chaotic as you are. He can't actually understand ordinary ponies any more than you can because you can't give him a trait you don't have within you, but he can use logic and observation to figure out what they care about, whereas you can't be bothered because caring what ponies care about is antithetical to chaos. And he can give you advice, but if you decide the advice is bad, you can make him go away.
And he works well for you. You don't ask his advice about Spike and Big Mac and their stupid Boys' Night Out, as if you really want to hang out with sidekicks and background ponies, but after they admit to you that your contributions would be awesome if they weren't so terrifying, you get Specs involved and he helps you plot things that won't actually terrorize your friends completely. Before long you have Specs GM'ing games so you can play as Captain Wuzz and be as taken by surprise by random monsters and plot twists as any of them, and while Specs isn't nearly as creative as you are, apparently he's a lot more creative than Spike – a thing Spike himself admits to you, acknowledging that the games your alter ego runs would be cooler than the ones he ran even if your powers weren't involved. You don't want him taking your friends away from you – the fact that he's more capable than you are of understanding what ponies like means you're honestly afraid that if you let him interact with your friends without you, they'd all end up his friends instead and shut you out – but he knows everything you do, so you can pull him out to ask for advice on something they said or did or something you should or did say or do, and he'll know what you're talking about whether he was there when it happened or not. Occasionally you let him sit in on incredibly boring meetings that Celestia for some reason wants your input on, because he hates them too but he can put up with it, being more logical and less chaotic than you are.
You never expected that he would almost get you killed. Although it's not really his fault; it wasn't like one of those "creation turns on creator" totally clichéd stories that you'd have had to destroy him for if that was the case just because of what an overdone trope that is. He did exactly what you made him to do; you didn't know that what he told you to do could literally end your existence, so he couldn't possibly have known either. Although you'd always had dreams that implied it, but you'd never had enough reason to betray chaos that you'd tested it in real life, and you can't remember any other avatar ever doing so either, so you didn't have any reason to know it could literally be true. After all, you used to have recurring nightmares about being forcibly turned into a pony, and now you can turn into a pony anytime you want and it doesn't have any effect on you at all aside from sadly making you somewhat less handsome, so why would you think the dreams of being forced to embrace order and subsequently fading away were actually a thing that could happen?
(Besides, you're the one who let it happen. Specs made the suggestions, but you're the one who sat there with it happening to you and did nothing to stop it, and that's the thing that terrifies you the most.)
It started when you were having tea with Fluttershy, and you asked her for another lump of sugar. It turned out she'd run out, and she mentioned stocking up the next time she went shopping to prepare for your next tea party. For some reason, it had never occurred to you before that Fluttershy had to put work into these tea parties, had to go shopping and spend her hard-earned bits... even though you know that Fluttershy doesn't have magic like yours and can't just make things happen by thinking about it, even though you know that Pinkie prepares elaborately for her parties, it had somehow never clicked in your head that of course Fluttershy has to work to make these parties happen because that's what ponies have to do. They can't wish whatever they want into reality.
In the past it might actually have pleased you to know that Fluttershy is working to make you happy, every week; it would have reinforced your belief that you matter to her. Now, however... now you know that you matter to her, and more importantly, she matters to you, and you no longer feel good about the notion that she's working to make you happy and you're doing nothing but sitting on your tail and accepting it. You're the all-powerful one, so why are you making your friend do all the work? You feel guilty. It's an awful feeling. You've never gotten used to it.
Specs shows up on the ceiling while you're trying to figure out what to do about this, grabs your ear, and suggests, "Why don't you host the next tea party?"
It's a good idea. You're irritated that you didn't see it immediately, because it's obvious, and then you're irritated that you're irritated, because Specs is you so if he came up with it then you came up with it. So you manifest a "Number 1" up-pointing glove and say cheerfully, "I've got it! Why don't I host the next tea party at my place?"
Specs pokes you in the nose and says, in an even more irritable tone than you'd felt a moment ago, "Hey, that's my idea."
Too big for his britches, is what he is. He's part of you, not his own entity, and he should learn to accept that. You snap your fingers and banish him by dropping him into a hole in the ceiling, upside down, and then pop his copy of your chair like a balloon.
Fluttershy is open to the whole idea, and the more you think about it, the more enthusiastic you get – until the moment when Fluttershy mentions that she's never been to your house before. This reminds you that you've never hosted a tea party before, which makes you realize that you have no idea what you're doing – and you've already gotten her to agree to doing it tomorrow, because you're so enthusiastic about it. Which means... you have no idea what it means. How much effort goes into planning and setting up a tea party? You don't know! You've never done one before! All you know about them are the ones Fluttershy has held, and the ones that Celestia used to put on for you and Luna but that was two millennia ago and there've been so many changes and anyway you were all kids. Is it possible you've bitten off more than you can chew? Will the preparation for a really good tea party that will impress Fluttershy take longer than a day? You have no idea, and while normally the notion of embarking on something where you don't know how it's going to turn out excites you, the thought of failing Fluttershy and putting on a tea party she doesn't like is mortifying. You need to leave and go make plans.
Specs isn't a lot of help. He tells you you need to knock this one out of the park, as if you don't already know that (after being ostentatiously offended that you dismissed him, like he thinks he's real; he's only willing to give you the advice you need after you point out that Fluttershy is the beneficiary here.) When he says that Fluttershy deserves the best of everything, though, that gives you a starting point. Fluttershy does deserve the best of everything, and while you can certainly make anything she could desire, you aren't so self-confident anymore as to believe that the things you make are the best things to give Fluttershy. After all, you're no expert on tea parties.
You go to the tea shop first. In the old days you weren't much of a fan of tea; it didn't really have the pizazz you were usually looking for from a drink. Now, though, you find the dizzying variety of various types of tea impressive. You suspect there was a lot less variety back when you unruled Equestria, which all by itself suggests to you that there was a flaw in your decision-making back then. Nowadays there's a lot less chaos, but when it happens it's original and fresh and it's not always yours. The complexity of great variety in a thing that ponies consider "normal" is something that wouldn't have happened on your watch, and you've come to like it.
What you don't like is when everything varies in just one regard. Every single tea just has a different taste! You knew that, of course, but you feel compelled to rant about it in the tea shop. Why can't tea have different tastes and also different effects? Why can't the tea do different and fun things? Why can't the rose hip green tea turn you green or grow roses all over your hips? (You rule that one out. Fluttershy would probably find it somewhat annoying to turn green or to grow roses from her hips.) Why can't ginseng tea actually sing? (That one, you decide on. Fluttershy would like a jaunty tune, you figure.)
After you change the ginseng so that it sings, and pay for it, the tea shop pony has the nerve to question your friendship with Fluttershy. The nerve! As if Fluttershy is so short-sighted and narrow-minded a pony that she can only be friends with others who are exactly like her? As if you're not capable of recognizing Fluttershy's many wonderful qualities just because she's not particularly chaotic? This is what you always hated about ponies, but you control the impulse to turn the shop pony into a turnip because Fluttershy would definitely be mad at you if you did that, and also Twilight, and honestly all of the rest of the ponies you consider friends, not to mention Spike, and besides if you think about it you admit that you would not like to be turned into a turnip by someone more powerful than you just because you said something hurtful and idiotic (although there is no one more powerful than you so this is just a thought experiment, of course, but you've lived through losing your powers three times now and it is theoretically possible that while you can't access your powers someone more powerful than you are at that moment could turn you into a turnip and you are fairly sure you wouldn't appreciate that, and Fluttershy says that if you wouldn't like it if someone did it to you, you should assume they probably wouldn't like you doing it to them, most of the time, unless you ask and they say yes.) You do, however, decide to annoy her by asking for validated parking when you don't even have a wagon parked in their lot.
You could snap up a tea set, but you know that Fluttershy's aesthetic sense runs much closer to what ponies think is attractive than what you like to look at, so you decide to buy one for her. Something expensive, finely made, and beautiful to pony eyes. The clerk at the shop that sells bowls and plates and tea sets nearly ruins your mood all over again by once more questioning your friendship with Fluttershy. What is it with these ponies? They all know Fluttershy – they live in the same town as her! How can they be so ignorant as to not know that anyone with any sense would be friends with Fluttershy if they could be? And once again, you're reminded how normal and boring pony lives are... all a teapot is supposed to do is pour tea? Yes, yes, you knew that, but they act like that's a good thing. Not for your friend, though! Only the finest, most exciting and interesting teapot for Fluttershy! Sure, you'll go with plain classic white even though you'd have preferred a jazzy orange and green styling if you'd been choosing for your own taste, and sure, it can be shaped like a teapot rather than a screaming pony head or an apple tree or something else unrelated to tea and pouring it, but at least it can pour itself and fly around like a decently interesting teapot... once you alter it.
You pay for it, with a lot of bits. You've found that since you finally have enough bits that you don't have to be careful with them or count out the correct amount anymore – which was absolutely hellish and you still resent Celestia for having forced you to go through that, back in the days when your only source of income was the bits she was paying you for closing all the gaps in spacetime around Equestria – you can get a lot more cooperation, and a lot less terrified screaming or rigid, teeth-chattering non-responsiveness, from the shopkeepers in Ponyville and other places if you just pay them for everything with a huge pile of bits. Celestia still doesn't let you make your own, but you've got several deals going with video game manufacturers that you enchant their games to give the enemy and NPC sprites a much more chaotic range of possible actions they can take. Apparently gamers love that stuff, they can't get enough of it. Arcade owners can charge two or three times as many bits per game for the ones you enchanted versus the ones programmed by ordinary pony game creators, so the game manufacturers can sell or lease the games for a lot more, and they give you a percentage of the profit every time they sell or lease a game machine. You've done some work with interactive comic book and interactive book creators to do similar things – no one wants the full range of your chaos, no, but to make a comic have multiple possible endings because in addition to the interactivity the readers provide to it, you've made the villains and non-player characters have the kind of agency and variety of actions they can take that you've routinely given to soup tureens and lamp posts in the past? Kids nowadays eat that up. And then there's the action figures that can actually take action. Mostly, doll versions of your friends, though you snicker hysterically to yourself every time you see a foal playing with the Nightmare Moon doll you enchanted to say things like "I would like it if somepony would style my mane" and "My star barrettes are fabulous!" Or the Celestia figure that loves to dunk her head in cake. Generally cake belonging to the foal playing with her.
Next up, the party supplies store. Decorations! An adorable piñata and a lava lamp are cute, but not quite enough. Fluttershy won't want to break open the cute piñata no matter how tasty the treats inside are, so you decide to make it sneeze out the candy. And the lava lamp would be a lot funnier if it was an actual tiny volcano. The napkins are a bit more of a puzzlement – how do you make napkins interesting? Should they glow? Not enough. Fly? Better, but for Fluttershy you need a bit more. Fold themselves? Fold themselves into fun shapes? Ooh! Is that Pinkie Pie?
You consult with Pinkie Pie. Surely she would know how to make this party perfect for Fluttershy!
Her suggestion is that you make Fluttershy feel comfortable, and that you ought to be able to do that easily, because you know her so well. She's right! You do know Fluttershy well! This ought to be a piece of cake, you decide confidently. You give the clerk enough bits that you can walk out without having to worry about actually going through the checkout – it's so tedious – and head home with your goodies.
Make Fluttershy feel comfortable. You mull it over, pacing in front of your house. You know her so well. You should be able to do this, right? Make Fluttershy comfortable. Shouldn't be a problem.
You open the door to your house, where you've already teleported the things you bought.
The ginseng are floating around, singing, intermingling with the flying folding napkins. The piñata sneezes out candy as the teapot sails past it, escaping from the scene of the crime after having randomly knocked down a photo of you and Fluttershy that was hanging on the wall. The swirling vortex of chaos in the center of the room shimmers in time with the burbling of the volcano on the ceiling as lava pours out. Some of the popcorn bush's kernels take the opportunity to pop loose. Pages flap on the books growing out of the book tree.
Maybe this is a problem.
But maybe not! Fluttershy is your friend, right? Maybe... maybe she would be comfortable here? You're comfortable here. Would she feel better if you're in a comfortable place?
(Are you sure you're friends with Fluttershy? You seem so very different from her.)
You need Specs. You made him to have a rational, clear head, unclouded by your obsessive love of chaos. You made him to care about what your friends think. He'll have an objective opinion.
So you summon him into existence. And he gasps in horror.
"That bad?" Your heart sinks.
"No, worse! Fluttershy would never be comfortable here! What have you done?!" He waves a rolled-up newspaper at you, as if you were an errant puppy. You don't particularly appreciate that.
"I was trying to make the tea party different and special, like me," you retort... but you can't escape the judgement of your own self. You wilt. "But all I did was make it chaotic and weird... like me." A horrifying thought strikes you. "What if those ponies at the tea shop and the china shop were right?" The train of thought unfurls in your mind, and you shake, wrapping yourself in your arms in a near-fetal position and rocking back and forth midair. "What if Fluttershy sees how crazy this place is and realizes how different we are? And then doesn't want to be friends anymore?" By the end of it you're in a full-blown panic, so the paper bag Specs gives you is appreciated. You blow into it hard, trying to recover yourself.
"Relax! We can fix this," he says. "Time to call in the team."
He opens the door and lets four copies of you in. These ones are the ones you're more used to making, the constructs without a lot of independent thought, programmed to do as you command them... except Specs created them, so they're under his command, but technically he is you so they're under your control, ultimately. Specs turns to you expectantly. "Okay, chief. What's the plan?"
You pace back and forth, your mind frantically shooting off in a thousand different directions, unable to focus and come up with an answer. "What to do, what to do, what to do... Oh!" The revelation, when it comes, hits hard... much harder than the other five Discords that crash into you because they were pacing too closely behind you. "Got it! We know Fluttershy, and we know what she likes. First of all, we need to get rid of all the new stuff."
Specs, being the one who is technically in control of the other four, shouts, "You heard him! Strike the new stuff!"
He puts on a hard hat, as do the others, and you follow suit because it was your idea in the first place. The others get to work. Two of you vacuum up the volcano on the ceiling (which, admittedly, had been dripping just a tad much.) One of you catches the flying napkins in a jar, one of you catches the teapot, the ones who dealt with the volcano scare off the piñata by summoning bats (piñatas hate bats, for obvious reasons), and you capture the ginseng teabags and stick them in a box, which you mail... somewhere. "Well done, everybody, but there's still more work to do!" you carol at your other selves, who'd been just about to tuck into their lunches. They grumble at you, but you ignore them. "We need to make this place more Fluttershy and less, well, me." The thought occurs to you to be grateful to Twilight Sparkle. You used to have a much more elaborate and even more chaotic home, but she wrecked it completely, and when you finally got around to making a new one you made something themed along the same cozy-cottage lines as Fluttershy's house, though with your own twist to it. Now, all you have to do is get rid of that twist. You'd never have been able to un-chaos the old place.
You teleport into the chaise lounge you made after sleeping on Fluttershy's chaise lounge for several days. "One thing I know about my dear friend is that she loves comfy chairs. But not on the ceiling." With a snap, it's on the floor. "And I'm almost certain she likes stairs... that lead somewhere." Specs obligingly grabs the bottom of the stairs to nowhere and snaps it into an elastic wall hanging. "And although we've never discussed it, I'm pretty sure Fluttershy likes gravity." Another snap, and you have consistently applied gravity throughout the cottage... causing several of your copy selves to fall, but really, why were they playing cards when there was work to be done anyway?
Oh, right. Because they have no imagination. You're the only real person here; you're the only one with the vision of what you want this place to be, for Fluttershy. "Okay, fellas! This is a good start, but stand back. Let me show you how it's done." You start snapping boring, ordinary, suburban-tract-housing style pony decorations into place, grateful for once for the hours of total boredom reading the magazines Fluttershy collects while she would deal with her animals. This is the stuff the magazines she gets are full of, so this must be what she likes, right?
There's an ache inside you, a twingeing pain when you look at what you've turned your home into. It's absolutely, horrendously awful, and the fact that you created it, and not for a prank where you're going to undo it all and laugh, is like nails scraping on the chalkboard of your brain. Also, your thumb hurts from snapping too many times in rapid succession. That, you can easily fix. The ache is something else. You made a home that's perfect to show off to Fluttershy, completely boring and normal and unexceptionally pony, and it's hurting you how dull it is. But it's for Fluttershy. It's to keep her friendship. No sacrifice is too great.
Thinking that was probably your first biggest mistake.
"How boring," Specs says. "I mean, normal."
"Thank you!"
"Good job," he says. "The window treatments are perfectly unexceptional."
And he's right. Everything is perfect and symmetrical and incredibly dull and ugh. Part of you can hardly bear to even look at what you've done to your lovely home. But it's for Fluttershy. Losing her would be worse than anything imaginable. You steel yourself against the weird aching sensation inside you, and muster up more cheer. "But we're not done yet," you say. You can't just attend such a fancy tea party as what you've created in your normal everyday fur and skin. The situation calls for dressing up, and you need the stimulation of some variety and change.
Specs' eyes go wide. "You don't mean..."
You nod. "Mm-hmm."
And all of you carol at once, as excited as little fillies, "Makeover!"
Every costume you put on that's actually stylish and attractive, Specs hates.
You try not to get offended. He's using what would appeal to Fluttershy as a metric, not what's objectively more colorful and complex. Eventually you wear the most boring, pony-dad outfit you can think of, and he says, "Hating... how much I love it!" Because the conflict in your heart, between what you want to be and what you need to be to keep Fluttershy's friendship, is affecting him too. Of course it is, he's you.
You try multiple different hairstyles. All of them are too weird, too chaotic... too much like who you really are. You recognize finally that you're hitting the limits of your own ability to imagine normality, and just settle for your standard appearance.
Specs dresses up as Fluttershy and you try conversation cards that you got from a book you stole from Twilight's library way back when. "It is very nice to see you today," you read painstakingly. "Have you read any good books lately? Your garden looks positively lovely."
It hurts to do this. It hurts to say these things, to stomp on your own desire to be spontaneous and free. Your own nature is rebelling against you, but when you say something that's too close to real, Specs scowls at you with a fake Fluttershy face. (You could have made an entire fake Fluttershy but that would have hurt far more when it disapproved.) He's the part of you that you need to listen to right now, not the rebellious screaming in your head that this is awful, that every last bit of this is awful, even that friendship with Fluttershy isn't worth this. Of course it's worth this! It's worth anything! Didn't you learn your lesson from Tirek? You wanted chaos, and you wanted freedom, so you hurt Fluttershy, and what you got was terror, deprivation, betrayal, and very nearly death, not to mention the depression and guilt afterward. Your desires to do anything you want and make everything special and different and unusual are bad when you're trying to keep a friend. Friendship is about compromise, right? Twilight would say so.
For a moment you consider consulting her. Should getting ready for a tea party with a friend really hurt like this? But you shake it off. You've learned your friendship lessons, you know what you need to do. You don't need Twilight to tell you the obvious. Fluttershy leads such a quiet and peaceful life. Surely the only reason you've managed to stay friends with her at all is that you've toned down the chaos when you're with her. She'd be scared off by the real you! Why, she was afraid of your stained glass window, when you first introduced yourself to her! She was terrified of your maze from the very first moment!
(You don't think about the fact that when it came down to it she was the only one you had to use brute force on, the only one who could stand up to you, because you don't like remembering the way you hurt her.)
No, it's obvious what you have to do. Your eyeballs lift out of your head and swing around to the back. Guided by your eyes, your paws reach up and open the little panel at the back of your skull, where there are dials attached to your brain. You spin down the one labeled "PAIN" until it's almost at zero. Then you also turn down "EXISTENTIAL ANGST". Good. Now you won't worry about whether or not you're violating your very nature and purpose in existing while you're making sure you keep your friend. You close the panel, put your eyes back, and go outside.
"What do you think of all this?" You wave at the sky. "Fluttershy and I go out for picnics when the weather's nice, and I was thinking of doing the same here, but..."
"Don't be ridiculous! You went to so much work to make the house normal, and now you're going to take her outside? To see all this?" Specs also waves his hands at the ever-changing bands of darkness smeared with threads of light that pulsate and ooze all around your little island. "Fluttershy could never tolerate looking at all this chaos!"
"But Fluttershy likes to go outside," you reiterate. "And I'm the master of chaos, and that means I can tell chaos to stop being chaos."
Specs blinked. "Are we really that powerful? This place is a lot older than we are."
"I'm not talking about transforming the entire dimension. Just a small section of it! A bubble of not-chaos for Fluttershy to enjoy."
"Hmm. Well, it's theoretically possible, but it's going to be a lot of hard work."
"Ugh, I know." You sigh. "Help out?"
Specs shrugged. "You're the guy with the vision, boss. Point me at what you want to do."
"Well, I'm thinking that first we make a sun." You snap a small magical fusion reactor into existence. It promptly burns itself out, fizzling like a candle. "Maybe a bigger sun."
"Let's get the guys in on this."
Specs summons the rest of the team. With vacuum cleaners, butterfly nets, and a miniature Tirek squeaky toy, they gather up enough magic from what seethes all around you that you can draw from it and transform it all into a tiny sun. After some thought, you realize that suns should not be purple, and change its spectrum to radiate the same as Celestia's, so the lighting will be right for Fluttershy.
Next you need a blue sky. You create a gigantic sphere around your island home, large enough to accommodate the sun. You've made plenty of suns in the land of Chaos, but most of them are just magical points of radiance and heat shaped to look like a sun. You're a little out of shape – the fusion reactor was hard, and making a sphere so big that you can put the fusion reactor in it without having it get unpleasantly hot on the floating island is even harder. Then there's the fact that the energies of chaos are more like an aether or a cloud than like air or space; even when you paint your sphere bright blue (you use the paint tool to color it, and have the extra Discords fix the spots you missed, because it would take too long with paintbrushes and rollers), the seething dark glow of chaos magic is all around you. It makes the sun dim and the sky look dark and forboding.
"No, this will never do," you say. "Come on, guys, one last push!"
The other Discords shove the chaos magic with giant pushbrooms, or bail it into a bucket, or siphon it with a pump. Specs makes small tornados that whirl the chaos magic into bottles. You just snap at it to move it outside the sphere. The effort is enormous. You can't feel pain anymore or you're sure this would hurt.
You transform your island into a temporary replica that looks like Equestria, and make cute animal sprites all over it, and some of the guys go and get some of the animals native to this dimension and then you size them down and let them loose here, because one thing you do know about Fluttershy is that she loves animals, even strange ones. The Skalboggen expresses deep irritation at this, but you tell it to suck it up. The Information Sphere, which looks exactly like the disembodied head of Twilight Sparkle, is very enthusiastic about getting to meet a pony, and very disappointed when you put her in a box and teleport the box to the back of your pantry. Fluttershy probably would not actually like to talk to something that looks like her friend's disembodied head, and also, the Information Sphere never shuts up. You chastise the Discord who thought getting that thing was a good idea. The other yous point at him and laugh at his stupidity. He pouts.
The chaos magic makes holes in your sphere and oozes back in.
You push it out. It comes back in. You strengthen the sphere. It routes around and makes small explosions pop out of your island. You shut down the explosions. The sun goes nova. You barely have time to teleport all the living things off your island before literally everything is vaporized, including the sun.
"This is looking like a no-go," Specs said.
You sigh. "I really wanted to take Fluttershy outside."
You recreate the island, and the thinking tree, and your perfectly unexceptional and boring new house. Fluttershy might go in the kitchen and offer to help with the washing up, so you have to fix that too to look completely normal. Oh! And ponies need bathrooms! Sheesh, that could have been embarrassing.
You feel drained. Empty. Flat. This must be what ponies feel like all the time. No restless energy burning through them, no obsessive desire to make everything in the world different, to make the patterns stop matching. All the patterns in your house are now a perfect match for common patterns found in Equestria. Everything is normal.
Just in time, too. It's almost time to get Fluttershy!
The six of you put your lion paws together, and then you vanish them all. Alone in your completely remodeled house, you mutter to yourself. "Huh. Quite strange. For the first time in my life, I don't feel quite strange. In fact, I feel... completely normal." This is what being normal feels like, right? You're excited to see Fluttershy, but normally you're abnormally excited, bouncing up and down in eagerness. Today, as eager as you are to see her... you feel tired, and kind of hollow. Well, you have stayed up a full day, or more, and you did expend a lot of magic fixing up this place. Plus all that business trying to make the outside conform to normality, to the predictable world Fluttershy lives in. You could have just thrown up an illusion, or made something that looks like a sun out of magic, but you wanted it to be right, and it turns out you couldn't do it. Chaos here is too unruly, even for you. But at least your house is completely under your control. "Everything is finally perfect for Fluttershy. And just in time."
You put on a pair of spectacles, because right now the part of you that loves friendship is ascendant which means you're kind of Specs right now, except not because he's only a piece of you and you're always all of you, though right now you feel like maybe you're not quite all of you. That's okay. You can go back to being chaotic later. You don't even really care about that right now. All you care about is Fluttershy.
You teleport her from her home to directly in front of your door and open it before she has a chance to really look around and get scared by the chaos outside. "Discord!" she says as you open the door. She's so bright and cheerful. "I'm so excited to finally see where you live!"
You want to grab her, pick her up and twirl her into the house. You want to give her a big hug. You want to yell "FLUTTERSHY! How wonderful to see you!" But you don't do any of those things because you're trying to be normal. Normal normal normal. "Greetings, friend. Please do come in," you say instead, calmly, with only a little tiny stutter.
As she walks in, she says cheerily, "I can't wait to see how... uh..." Her face falls with confusion as she looks around. "Oh." She actually looks sad. Dejected. Disappointed. Oh no, what did you do wrong? She must be picking up on the weirdness anyway even though you were sure you got rid of all the weirdness. Maybe you need to make the carpet more even or the walls closer to perfect right angles to each other? Surreptitiously, without letting there be a flash or snapping your talon or paw, you tighten up the precision on everything. Perfectly straight lines! Perfectly square proportions on picture frames! Rectangles that perfectly match the Golden Mean!
Something inside you starts aching. You can't really pinpoint whether it's your head or chest or arms or maybe just all over, because you turned down your pain sensing ability. The thought occurs to you that the fact that you can feel pain at all is worrisome given that pain should be almost completely turned off, but the part of you that is Specs says not to worry about it because the important thing here is Fluttershy and besides you're too happy at getting to see your friend and too nervous about what she'll think to much care about anything else.
"Is something amiss?" you ask, with a smile plastered on your face because no one should be frowning or upset when they're with a friend.
"Um, no, no, not at all. It's just not what I expected." She trots over to the table where you've laid out the sandwiches, and smiles at you. "It's quite... lovely."
You beam at the praise. That makes all of this worth it. "Please have a seat," you say, slowly and carefully, making sure to maintain total control of what you're saying. There can't be anything spontaneous. That would be too chaotic.
"Where is it?" Fluttershy asks, as you push a plush armchair over to the table.
"Right here."
"Oh."
Does she not like the chair? She sounds disappointed. You keep the smile plastered on, trying harder. "I think you'll be quite pleased with the green tea I've selected for us today."
That makes her face light up. "Oooh! Does it actually turn us green? Is it really envious of the other teas? What's it do, what's it do?!"
Fluttershy must be humoring you because she knows you'd normally do something ridiculous (fun) to the tea, but you were there in the store with the tea pony. You know that's not what she really likes, because otherwise the tea pony wouldn't have thought it was so weird that you wanted the teas to do something different while still being Fluttershy's friend. "Uh, well, it tastes delicious."
There's that look of disappointment again. "Oh... Okay."
You sit down on the couch, after serving Fluttershy her tea. "What particularly nice weather we're having," you say. That was on your conversation cards as ice-breaking small talk that would be appropriate in any setting.
"Yes... Yes, we are."
Fluttershy seems so stiff and uncomfortable. You try harder with the conversation cards. "It did rain the other day, however."
She makes a noncommittal noise. You soldier on. "But the weather today is particularly nice." Wait, you already said that. "...As I previously mentioned." Oh, dear, what a faux pas. You're not supposed to make it look robotic. It's supposed to seem natural. You change the subject to cover it up. "Would you care for some milk toast?" you ask, offering her a plate. It's toast covered in milk sauce, exactly what ponies expect milk toast to be, not toasted milk or milk in the shape of toast slices.
"Uh, Discord, you don't seem to be yourself today," Fluttershy says. "Are you feeling all right?"
Oh, no! She's picking up that this is completely unnatural for you and that you're terrible at it! You lose the smile you've been keeping pasted on your face. "Whatever do you mean?"
"Well, it's just... what you're wearing," she says, almost apologetically. "And also what you're saying. And also the way you're saying it. And, um, pretty much everything else."
You wave a paw dismissively and put the smile back on. "Oh, dear Fluttershy, worry not. I can assure you that for the first time, I'm feeling perfectly normal." At least, you assume so, since you've never felt normal by pony standards before. "Now, let me top you off."
You pick up the teapot and go to pour Fluttershy more tea, but suddenly there's no strength in your talon and the teapot falls. A quick pulse of magic keeps it from shattering, but you can't pick it up with magic because Fluttershy is a pegasus and doing that is only normal for unicorns and besides, you shouldn't need to. "Oops! Butterfingers!" You press your talon to your head. It feels numb... on both sides, somehow, because your head can't feel it and it can't feel your head. It's not turning to stone, though, because it's just as light as normal. Maybe lighter. "How embarrassing."
You attempt to reach for the teapot again, but your talon goes right through it, as if it isn't even there. Fluttershy asks, "What's going on?"
Are you transforming involuntarily into your magical form? No, you're in your magical form by default in Chaosville. You're made of solid magic, here. (And in Equestria, most of the time.) Are you transitioning to your matter form and failing? No, you're not actively running any spells, voluntarily or involuntarily. You wave your hand through the teapot a few more times, trying to solidify it, to no avail, and then hold it up to your face. It's slightly transparent. "I have... no idea," you admit reluctantly.
Abruptly Fluttershy gasps. "Discord! You're starting to fade away!"
You look down at yourself. Your whole body is slightly transparent now, and that hollow feeling from before has intensified, and everything around you looks and sounds slightly muted. You realize then that you're very, very tired, and the excitement of seeing Fluttershy had been masking it. Oddly, though, you're not afraid, or even particularly upset. You don't feel much of anything. Only the continuing desire to make sure Fluttershy thinks well of you and doesn't reject your friendship. So you decide that this isn't very important. "Oh, you don't say..." Quick, change the subject. Use the conversation cards! "Have you read any good books lately?" You chuckle nervously.
Fluttershy just stares at you in horror. "Discord, you're disappearing," she breathes, sounding... frightened? Oh, and you tried so hard! You got rid of all the chaos in the environment and now something stupid and chaotic is happening and upsetting her. Well, you'll just have to keep being normal and maybe she'll ignore it.
You wiggle your fingers in front of your face. "Huh." She's right, you are disappearing. That's inconvenient. You shrug, and muster up what's left of your energy to feign enthusiasm, trying to distract her. "Have you tried the scones? They're positively delectable." You lean forward, as if imparting something confidential to her. "The secret is in the extra butter."
"What is wrong with you?" Fluttershy asks, sounding completely exasperated. "You're acting so normal, which is not so normal for you!"
She's right, but you can't let her know that, because then she won't want to be friends. "Well, whatever do you mean?" you ask, adjusting your glasses. "This is just me, being me."
"No, it's not!" From any other pony it would have been a shout. "It's you being like everypony else!"
But isn't that what everypony wants from you? Isn't that the price you have to pay for friendship? Besides, you feel like it's okay. You're too tired and empty to be chaotic right now, so you might as well be orderly, and keep your friendship safe. (A tiny part of you reminds you that Fluttershy chose to be your friend despite how chaotic you were, and then a larger part reminds you that Celestia told her to make friends with you and just because she was willing to overlook the chaos doesn't mean she wouldn't be happier with a you that didn't have it.)
The teacup isn't on the saucer. Everything needs to be neat and precise. Your paws aren't solid anymore, so to pick up the teacup and saucer and put them together require an effort of magic. You're actually using telekinesis, and only making it look like your hands are doing it. It's so tiring, though. Normally you can sling the sun and moon around with a snap. Now, lifting a teacup and saucer is almost beyond you, and while you smile to see that you've accomplished the task and they're together being neat and proper, you feel even more weary once you're done. It's as if you have no energy at all. But it would be rude to take a nap during a tea party, or lounge back and lay down on the couch.
Fluttershy screams, putting her hooves to her head. "The more you do it, the more you fade away!" You glance down at your paw. It's much more transparent. There's a ringing in your ears making it hard to hear Fluttershy, and the brightly lit room seems dimmer somehow. None of this really concerns you, though. This is what it means to be normal, right?
"Of course!" Fluttershy says. "You're a creature of pure chaos! Being normal is destroying you!"
You force a chuckle. If she's right, and your choices are to lose your friends or to be destroyed... eh. You've lived a long time. None of this matters, anyway. Except Fluttershy. "How interesting. That reminds me of something I heard at the market today," you say, from the conversation cards.
Fluttershy gets in your face. "Stop it! Please! You need to go back to being your not-normal normal self!" She sounds almost panicked. "Quick, Discord! Uh, do something chaotic before it's too late! Please!"
You don't like the sound of her being unhappy, though the truth is, even your feelings about that are muted. But she specifically asked you to do the thing you've been terrified of doing, lest you lose her, and it's hard for you to think or concentrate. The paradox makes your head buzz. "Do something chaotic?" you say to her. "I'll try..." But you can't even think of something. The magic doesn't want to well up within you; drawing on it seems like such an effort. And when you try to snap the fingers on your lion paw, they go through each other, even though you just adjusted your glasses a moment ago. You're no longer even solid to yourself.
You look at your fingers, one poking right through the other, and you can't really feel either one. "Ohhhh, that's not good..." you mumble.
Oh, well. It's gone too far to do anything about it. You can't muster up the energy to care. You'll just sit here and listen to Fluttershy and watch her until everything goes numb and there's nothing left but darkness and silence. It's all right. At least this way you get to have your dear friend care about you for as long as you live.
"Then I guess it's up to me," Fluttershy says. She shows every evidence of racking her brain for something to do. You smile slightly, pleased at the evidence that she cares, but you're so tired. "Okay. All right. How about..." With great resolve, she deliberately knocks one of the teacups over. You'd straighten it out for her, but the exhaustion is overwhelming you.
"Oh, no!" Fluttershy says in a totally insincere voice. "I tipped over that cup!" She looks to you for approval. "That's pretty chaotic, right?"
You yawn. You don't mean to. It's very rude. But you're so tired. Moving is an effort, talking is an effort, keeping your eyes open is an effort.
Fluttershy's so upset. You want to tell her everything will be all right, that it's better this way, that you don't mind. You want to pat her on the head and reassure her. But you feel like you have no energy to do anything, that if your body didn't feel so light you wouldn't even be able to remain upright. Your mouth moves, but no sounds come out.
Fluttershy is spinning the tray of sandwiches and chomping on each sandwich as it goes by. She looks up hopefully, mouth full of sandwich. "Oh, my! Talking with food in my mouth after taking a bite from every sandwich!" As she swallows, she lets her tongue hang out and shakes her head like a dog. "How wacky!" She's so funny, and so cute. She thinks she's being chaotic, and it's adorable, and she cares about you. That's all you need, really. That's more than enough. If you fade out of existence with her by your side, proving that she cares by trying uselessly to save you, that would be fine. "Doing anything for you?"
You shake your head at her sadly as the world gets even dimmer and the ringing in your ears gets even louder. But it's all right, you wish you could say. It's been such a long time, and so hard, struggling against a world where no one understands you or appreciates your chaos and you're so different from everyone. You're tired. You're ready to put the burden down.
"Okay. Hmm. Maybe I need to start thinking like you. Ohhh... What would Discord do?" She paces nervously. The world has gone dim enough that the bright yellow of her coat and pink of her mane is practically all you can see. "Well, I guess he'd probably make another version of himself to bounce ideas off of." She does something. You're not sure what because you can't see in that level of detail anymore. "But one wouldn't be enough. He'd need more! Way more!"
Actually, you generally speaking only have one of you to bounce ideas off of, but you can't say so. You see Fluttershy darting back and forth. Almost despite yourself, you strain to see what she's doing. You feel curiosity, and a desire not to fade away at least until you've figured out what she's doing. She doesn't have any magic – well, not like the kind she could use to make Other Fluttershys.
Oh, that's what she's doing. You smile slightly. Those are mirrors! Or reflective, shiny things, anyway. Now she's got several of them lined up, and she says to them, "Hey there, Fluttershys! Any ideas on how to Discord up this tea party?"
You wonder how they're going to answer her. In your newly-remodeled, chaos-free home, mirrors don't talk. But Fluttershy herself pipes up in a voice that's even higher pitched than normal, "Hi, Fluttershy! Thanks for asking!" Ooh, that's good. You'll have to remember that the next time you make extra yous, that they should be polite and thank you for asking them. Wait, but that assumes you're not about to disappear. "First of all, you gotta redecorate this place. I mean, this is where Discord lives! And you're telling me there aren't any stairs that lead to nowhere?" Huh. Are you really that predictable? She never saw your place with the stairs that led to nowhere in it before. Maybe she talked to Twilight?
In a normal voice, she says, "On it!" And then she starts zipping around, flying about and carrying things, moving furniture. Eventually she has... something? You strain to see. Oh. She's piled furniture and other things in a generally stair-step manner. How amusing.
Then she grabs the wall hanging that you turned your last set of stairs to nowhere into, and throws it over the whole mess, and that makes it funny. She's undoing the work you did to please her, in order to save you! Despite feeling so weak you can barely bring yourself to move, you force yourself to your feet so you can walk over and see Fluttershy's "stairs to nowhere" more clearly. Once you're moving, it feels like it's a little easier to move. You stroll up to take a good look at the silliness. Huh. Quite a nice improv staircase. You're proud of her. And the fact that she's trying to save you from vanishing by doing ridiculous things that don't make sense is itself hilarious.
"It's working!" Fluttershy says delightedly, looking at you, and... maybe it is? You feel like maybe you're not quite as exhausted as you were a moment ago, and maybe the ringing isn't quite as loud.
She flies over to consult with her mirrors. "Okay, what else? Furniture on the ground? So predictable! Let's put them where they don't belong!" Then she flies into your kitchen and opens all your drawers, finding your neatly stacked and sorted silverware, your neatly sorted and collated drawer full of twist ties and rubber bands, and finally your neatly sorted drawer full of hardware such as hammers and nails and safety glasses, because you'd never actually use such things and if you did you'd just summon it into existence but ponies have neat and orderly drawers full of things like that.
Fluttershy hammers nails halfway into your ceiling in specific spots, wearing her safety goggles. The nails go in pairs, but pairs that are unevenly separated – some have a short span between them, others quite a wide distance. She ties twine from your drawer onto one of the nails, loops it under your footstool, and drags it up, to tie it around the other nail. Then she carefully rotates the footstool so that it's facing the ceiling, and uses her own flight power to hold it in place, balancing it on her lower legs and the rope while her wings flap frantically and her upper legs strain to hammer the feet of the footstool to the ceiling. She does the same with the lamp, using much longer nails to get through the base. Then she pulls the entire tablecloth off the table, knocking the mirrors, the teacups and everything onto the floor, drags the table over and hauls it up.
You're more and more impressed as you watch her work. She's straining hard; Fluttershy is probably the physically weakest of her entire group of friends, but she's hauling furniture to the ceiling and nailing it in with a really bad excuse for a rope pulley, just to save you. Oh, and a sofa. Sweet chaos. She's got the entire sofa wrapped in three sets of twine and she hauls it up to the ceiling, panting hard with the exertion, sweat sheening her flanks, but she's doing it for you.
Once she's done, she flies down to you, breathing hard, but smiling. You're definitely feeling stronger. The world isn't nearly so dim as it was, and the ringing's almost stopped. You smile back at her.
Gleefully Fluttershy says, "And he'd have a chaise lounge that would actually chase you! Because he's funny like that!"
She thinks you're funny?
(But you knew she thought you were funny. It was why you got so upset when she said Tree Hugger was the funniest pony she knew, because she'd said the same thing to you.)
"Bet you can't catch me!" she says to the chaise lounge, poking it, and then runs off. You can't help laughing a bit. For a moment, you want so much to be able to animate the lounge to chase her, like she wants... and the feeling of want makes you feel strong, just for a moment. You snap your fingers... and chaos floods into you, through you, warming you and filling you and making you feel solid and real and able to feel again.
You laugh heartily, delighted, as the chaise lounge starts chasing her all over the room and around you, and you can't stop laughing because it's hilarious and because she's obviously enjoying herself. A pony, enjoying your chaos! (But Fluttershy always enjoyed your chaos, that's why you were such good friends...)
She stops in front of you. The chaise lounge stops as well, panting like a dog. "And Discord would have a special kind of tea!" she says. "Like a ginseng that could really sing!"
Like the tea you bought and animated, just to do that exact thing. "I would," you say, stumbling over the words. "I-I would!" You snap your talon and summon back the box of ginseng tea that you mailed to somewhere random in Equestria. Another snap opens the box, and the tea bags dance out, singing. They fly over to Fluttershy and serenade her for a bit before going on their way.
While the tea bags are singing to her, Fluttershy says, "And he'd serve it on a floating table! We never talked about it, but I'm pretty sure Discord hates gravity!"
Something inside you is thawing out, even melting, in the warmth of Fluttershy's understanding. She really gets you. Why did you think she wouldn't? "I do! Who wants to be tethered to the ground when you can do this?"
You snap, and gravity turns off. Everything on the floor lifts up and floats, while the things nailed to the ceiling untether, also floating. A shame to undo all of Fluttershy's hard work, but things that are bound to anything are metaphorically antithetical to chaos, and right now you desperately crave chaos. Fluttershy laughs.
"Now this is exactly what I was hoping for!" she says, delighted.
You're glad it's what she wanted, but you don't understand. "This is what you were hoping for? But this is the complete opposite of your tea parties."
"I wouldn't expect you to throw a tea party the way I would," she says. "We're different!"
Her voice is so cheerful, but those last two words hurt. They've been so often used to explain why what you want from ponies is something you can never get. You look away from her. "I know. I was afraid that if you saw exactly how different we are, you wouldn't want to be friends anymore."
Fluttershy zips around you to face you and grabs your face in her hooves. "What? Why would you ever think that?"
You remember the tea pony, and the judgy sales clerk at the teapot store, and you look away again. "Because you and I don't make sense to anypony else." And you've always said you love things that don't make sense, but that's because you can make them become reality. You have no power over Fluttershy or over friendship. You know why she decided to try to make friends with you, but you still don't understand how it became real, or why she forgave you for betraying her, or for all the other terrible things you've managed to do to her or her friends over the course of this friendship.
"That may be true, but we make sense to me," she says. "I never would've thought to make singing ginseng before I met you. But you've opened me up to so many more possibilities and impossibilities. So I guess what I'm trying to say is I like you because you're so different from me."
"You do?"
"Of course I do, silly!" she says. "Besides, what's discord without a little chaos?"
Apparently, nonexistent. You laugh. "Well! In that case, I certainly don't need to be wearing this." You pull off the spectacles, sweater and tie you wore to present the image of sober normality... and find the Fluttershy costume that was the last thing Specs had been wearing before you reabsorbed him with the others. "Oops! I forgot that I still had this on!"
Fluttershy giggles. "Now, about that tea party..."
You show her your garden, where you grow pinwheels and goofy pickles and flowers that never shut up because what else would you do if you had two lips? She oohs and aahs over them, and is properly appreciative of your Thinking Tree, and she thinks the Skalboggen is adorable. During the tea party, you make the tea sandwiches into butterflies that flit around the room, and when it's time for sandwiches you give Fluttershy a butterfly net and she chases after the sandwiches, managing to catch your head instead. When the ginseng bags go in the teapot, the teapot whistles a jaunty tune, and the tea itself hums when poured in a cup.
Everything is wonderfully silly and Fluttershy spends nearly the entire time laughing and giggling, when she isn't stuffing her face, which makes you laugh because she's obviously decided that filling her mouth with sandwiches like a chipmunk continues to be an entertaining thing to do, and you can't believe you thought she would want you to be different. You know Fluttershy. You know what she likes in her personal life, yes, but you also know she likes you. Except you can't believe it. She shows it to you time and time again and you still can't believe it. You just nearly destroyed yourself because you can't believe it. But you don't want to think about that, not while she's here, not while the fun is going on.
When it's time for her to go, she says, "I had a lovely time, Discord. Your house is wonderful."
"Thank you," you say.
"But..." She hesitates. "I'm worried about you, okay? You – you could have been badly hurt, today." She means dead. Fading out of existence hadn't been painful at all. "I don't like the thought of losing you, and I especially don't like the thought of losing you because you're afraid of losing me. You know you can come to me if you're worried about something, right?"
You take a deep breath. "I know," you say. "But, Fluttershy... if what I'm worried about is that you won't like me if you know something about me, how could I possibly come to you with that? Because if I'd been right, and I tell you the thing that I think means you won't like me, then you won't like me, and..."
"I've seen you do some terrible things, though. And I still like you."
You sigh. "But what if?"
"I guess that is a problem," Fluttershy says. "I don't suppose... if I told you you could go to one of our other friends, you wouldn't believe me, would you?"
"If it's something that makes me think you wouldn't be friends with me anymore, then there's a chance it would make them not be friends with me, wouldn't it?"
"You could have gone to Twilight with this problem, though. She's been to your house before; she knows what it's like. That's how I knew there were supposed to be stairs to nowhere. And Constant told me about the singing ginseng—"
"Constant?"
"She runs the tea shop. You met her. Constant Comment? She said it was sweet how much you seemed to care about me."
"She's the one who asked me if I was really friends with you!" You are indignant.
"Um, yes, I'm sorry she did that... she kind of, uh, has no filter? She just says things that come into her head even if they're rude, but she doesn't mean to be rude, she's just kind of inconsiderate. She's not just named after a kind of tea." Fluttershy sighs. "I'm going to have to have a word with her, because what she said to you was really hurtful, and I'm sure she has no idea how much damage she almost did." She brightens. "But the part about knowing that you don't like gravity, I didn't have any hints about that," she almost-brags. "That's just me knowing you."
"You do know me quite well," you admit happily.
"But anyway? You could have asked Twilight, because she knows how chaotic your house is normally, and she's the Princess of Friendship. Or you could have talked to Pinkie. She's pretty chaotic and pretty different from, um, nearly every pony ever, except for Cheese Sandwich, but she has lots of friends and they all know what she's like."
"I suppose so, but it just seemed obvious." You summon Specs just so you can glare at him. "And I got some bad advice."
"Hey, don't look at me, pal. I'm you. You're the one who made me to worry more about friendship and less about chaos, and if you're insecure, then I'm insecure."
"Your advice almost got me—" You can't bring yourself to say "killed" in front of Fluttershy, to make it real in words what nearly happened. "—in a lot of trouble!"
"You're the one who decided to take it. I trusted you to be able to stay true to yourself no matter what I told you; didn't that used to be the most important thing to you? It's not my job to make sure there's enough chaos in our lives, it's yours."
"I hate that name," Specs grouses, even though he usually doesn't.
"What would you prefer to be called?" Fluttershy asks.
"Oh, I hadn't even thought about it." Specs is plainly discombobulated by being treated by Fluttershy as a separate person, not just another copy of you. "Maybe Steve." You roll your eyes. Seriously? Steve?
"Okay, then," Fluttershy says. "It's obvious that Steve's advice was well-intentioned. But if you make extra yous to bounce your ideas off of... that's still you. They don't know anything you don't, they feel what you feel, and they don't have any perspective you don't have."
"But I made him to focus on friendship mattering," you say. "So that I wouldn't... you know. Things like what I did at the Gala to Tree Hugger that one time. Or, uh... Tirek." You slump. "I needed there to be someone who was me but who wouldn't do things just because they cause chaos. Someone who'll always remember that I should care more about my friends than about my chaos. Because that is what I think I should feel, but sometimes... I get carried away. You know."
"I do," Fluttershy says warmly. "And I'm sure having someone like that to advise you would be great in a lot of circumstances. But, Discord... a friend who wants you to completely become the opposite of who you are isn't a good friend. You have to balance your need for friendship with the need to be, well, you. I never thought I would have to tell you that because I always thought you were so confident in being you. I had no idea you felt this way."
"Well, normally I am confident. It's just... the tea shop pony... Constant Annoyance or whatever her name is... and the teapot store pony too! She thought it was weird that we were friends too!"
"Raspberry and Constant are both new in town... they don't know you that well, and they don't know me that well. I only know them because, well, I buy a lot of tea. But does it really make sense to listen to what total strangers have to say about our friendship, when they don't know either of us? All the rest of our friends understand."
"They didn't. For a long time. I'm still not sure Rainbow or Rarity do."
"Princess Celestia asked me to make friends with you, and she's thousands of years old and knows practically everything. Surely her opinion that we would make good friends is more important than Raspberry Vinaigrette's or Constant Comment!"
Princess Celestia said no such thing; she told Fluttershy to reform you. Fluttershy was the one who came up with the idea of doing it with friendship. You don't point that out. "I suppose... maybe I should have consulted Twilight. Pinkie wasn't actually any help. She told me to make you comfortable. I couldn't imagine you being comfortable here!"
"Discord, I'm comfortable with you because you're my friend. Pinkie was really just telling you to be yourself. But I admit what she said sounded a little vague, so probably you should have asked Twilight because she would have given you a lot more details and then maybe you wouldn't have misunderstood." She gives you a hug. "I've got to get back home, but please don't be too mad at Steve. His advice wasn't very good, but that's because most of the time, when you're worried about a friendship problem, the problem is you think too much chaos is a good idea. Steve can't possibly help you with a problem where you think that maybe all of your chaos is a bad idea. He's just going to tell you you're right, because he's the part of you that's insecure about what your chaos can do to your friends. And it's a good idea to have him around and bounce ideas off of him, but I think maybe you should look at an outside perspective too, the next time this happens? Talk to Twilight. She'll help you."
"His name isn't Steve," you say, disgruntled.
"Well, if he wants to be called Steve, then that's my name for him," Fluttershy says emphatically. "Anyway, please send me back home, and I'll see you next Tuesday?"
"I wouldn't dream of missing it."
"Maybe you could come by sooner than that and we could have a picnic or go somewhere," Fluttershy says. "I do worry about you."
"Oh, I'm right as rain now, Fluttershy. Don't worry about me. But if you absolutely insist we go on an outing together, who am I to say no? I'll drop by sometime before Tuesday. Unexpectedly."
She laughs. "There you go. That's my real Discord." She lets go of you and flits back out of your personal space. You miss her already. She waves. "Good night, Discord!"
"Good night," you and Specs both say, and you snap to send her home.
You turn to Specs. "Steve?"
"She's right, you know." Specs' head is hanging dejectedly. "I never imagined that focusing on her rather than on chaos might kill us."
"Well, I'm glad you admit your advice was a terrible, awful idea, but it all worked out in the end so all's forgiven. Mostly."
"Don't sweep this under the rug," Specs snaps, catching you out in the act of sweeping air under a floating rug. "What was all that business about 'oh, it's okay to peacefully fade out of existence because life is terrible and no one loves chaos' and all that?"
"I don't know," you snap. "Probably a perfectly normal side effect of being about to die from lack of energy. What, would you have preferred that I recite poetry? 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light!'"
"Yes," Specs snaps back, "because I don't want to die!" He snaps a paw, and another you appears, dressed all in black with the thick black mane of your youth as an unruly mop on his head.
"Life is pain," Emo Discord intones. "Oh, how hard it is to be a chaotic draconequus in a world that appreciates only harmony!" He starts using a nail file to try to cut the back of his paw, futilely.
Angrily you snap him out of existence. "Stop it."
"You stop it! You can't deny it anymore. That guy is in us and if you don't take measures to contain him, sooner or later someone's going to cast a spell of despair on you and it's actually going to get through."
"I fought off Apep on the moon. Don't talk to me about giving in to despair."
"I am going to talk to you about it because I don't want to die and you're an idiot who likes to hide from his problems until they turn him to stone, or worse. You need help. Someone who isn't Fluttershy or me, to talk to."
"Is this more 'Oh, I should go to Princess Twilight?'" you sneer.
"Are you kidding? I know why you don't want to go to Twilight with your problems, and I agree! She'll never look up to us or respect us if we come whining to her with a friendship problem! I'm thinking Cadance."
You blink. "Cadance is the Princess of Love. Why am I going to her with a friendship problem?"
Specs facepalms. "Please tell me you're not really this stupid."
"No. Seriously. Why Cadance?"
Specs sighs deeply. "Since I need to spell it out for you? You betrayed our oldest, most sacred principle because I told you to, and I told you to so we wouldn't lose Fluttershy, even though now that everything's happened, in retrospect I can see that we were total idiots to think we might lose Fluttershy as a friend or that we had to go all the way overboard into psychotic order to keep her. Ponies don't, generally, practically die to keep a friend unless there's something else involved."
"Really? So Starlight Glimmer engaging in a lifelong crusade against cutie marks doesn't count?"
Specs snorts. "Bad example. You've seen how she looks at her pal in the Crystal Empire, the foalsitter for Cadance's mutant alicorn filly."
"Okay, then, what about that friend of Twilight's in Canterlot who went crazy because Twilight wouldn't go to her party?"
"The jury's out on that one. I kinda think she might be a bad example, too, but I just don't care enough to investigate. Now if Twilight was interested back, that might change matters, but otherwise... pony has crush on Twilight, news at eleven. Ho hum." Specs pokes you in the chest. "Face it, you've got it bad."
This time you're the one who sighs. "What does it matter? Fluttershy's not interested in being that kind of friend."
"How do you know? You never asked her."
Now you're the one to give Specs a condescending look. He wilts. "Right." Then he perks up. "But she hugs you spontaneously, and that's more than you get from most of them, so there's a chance! You should talk to Cadance."
"If I agree to talk to Cadance, will you shut up about it?"
"Not unless you also talk to Cadance about... that other thing. Not like she would be able to help with it, most likely, but... maybe she can help you find help."
"That other thing?" You know perfectly well what he's talking about, but you hate thinking about it.
Specs is suddenly sporting Emo Discord's hair. "Oh, how beautiful it is to fade away into the darkness," he says, head back and arms akimbo as if he's soliloquizing, his gruff and scratchy variant of your voice distorted by his parody of a bad actor in a Spear Shaker play.
"Look, you were there. I was running out of energy."
"But you didn't fight!" Specs is in your face. "As soon as you saw Fluttershy do something that was funny enough that you wanted to participate, you did fight it. So you could have all along! But no, it's 'ah, how sweet it is to drift away to nonexistence on the tides of Fluttershy's concern for me'—"
"So what do you expect me to do?" you asked harshly. You're lying on a couch, with Specs in a high-backed chair wearing a lab coat and holding a notebook. "Go to therapy?"
"I don't know! But we need to do something!" Specs stands up and paces frantically in mid-air, his tail swishing. "We've fought so many entities that have tried to make us give in to despair, and we've never lost a battle before. But Fluttershy – Fluttershy makes us feel things we've been able to pretend for centuries that we don't feel, or we don't need to feel, and now we have a hole in our defenses that could kill us! Are you getting this? You almost gave up and died because it was too much work to fight for your life! When Fluttershy said to your face that you were destroying yourself and you needed to stop, you said 'How interesting' and then pulled some crap off a conversation card! You knew being orderly was killing us and you didn't care! You doubled down on it! When it started hurting you just turned off the pain and then you didn't even notice you were dying!"
"Yes, probably I shouldn't do that again."
"You shouldn't do any of it again!" Specs is frantic. You made him to be an embodiment of your rationality so it's a little odd to see him panicking like this. "We have to do something! We have a self-destructive killer inside us!"
"We always did," you say somberly.
This brings Specs up short. "Come again?"
"You don't remember dying," you say, "because I didn't give you access to that. But every time I die, I'm tempted to stay there. Or back when I unruled Equestria. I had everything I could possibly want – chaos, everywhere. Me, in charge of anything I'd decided I was in charge of that day, and then I could just hand it off to whoever wanted to be in charge of it when I was sick of it. It should have been perfect." You sit down heavily in a floating chair. "But every so often I'd go to worlds where my powers didn't even work, because the only way I could distract myself from how empty I felt was to risk my life, and it's hard to risk danger when you're omnipotent."
"How come I don't remember any of that?" Specs asks with just a touch of belligerence.
"Because you didn't need to," you tell him. "Believe me, I'm doing you a favor. I hate remembering those things. But, if you must know the completely honest truth... that overly dramatic fellow who wishes he could just painlessly fade away and die? He's always been there. Well, for a very, very, very long time, anyway. He was there all of those times in the past when I successfully fought off despair attacks, and I still won."
"But today you almost lost."
"I did. Yes." You put your chin in your paw. "Do you know why?"
"No, why?"
"I'm asking you.I certainly have no idea."
"Well, why would I know it if you don't know it?"
"I don't know!"
"Well, you need to find out!" Specs mimics your chin in paw gesture, stroking his goatee, as he realizes something. "Wait. I mean you need to find out why you almost lost, not why I would know something you don't know."
"I know that." You sigh. "So what have we learned today?"
Specs takes out a clipboard. "Let's write this down so you don't forget." He arches an eyebrow at you. "Well?"
"Oh, you expect me to answer? I was asking you."
"You're the boss. You're the one who needs to remember."
You sigh again. "Fluttershy cares about us even though she knows perfectly well how chaotic we are."
"Good, that's good." He writes it down. "Anything else?"
"Chaos avatars can die if they expend too much magic trying to make things orderly. At least, in Chaosville. That might not happen if we did it in Equestria."
Specs shudders. "Please don't test it."
"Wasn't planning on it. Um. Singing ginseng is very tasty and really boosts your energy."
"Okay, I don't think that's as important as the other things you haven't mentioned yet, but fine, I'll write it down." He scribbles. He's not actually writing anything down, because you'd have a hard time reading it anyway. "What else?"
"When the levels of chaos get so low that my energy drops to nothing..." You swallow. "I don't have anything left to fight the part of me that wants to be dead."
"Right. So never get in that situation again. Anything else?"
You shrug. "That seems to me to be all the important stuff."
Specs raises both eyebrows. "Well, I think you're leaving out at least two things. Firstly, remember at all times: who cares what ponies think? Unless they're Fluttershy, her friends, or ponies who are your friends."
"Seems fair." You shake your head. "I can't believe I forgot that."
"The other thing is that neither of us have any idea what to do about the little draconequus inside that wants us all dead, so you need to ask someone. Maybe Fluttershy! That seems like the kind of problem she could help us with."
Shaking your head, you say, "I don't want to worry her. Did you see how upset she got when we were fading out?"
"Couldn't miss it. Ugh! I'll have nightmares for months."
"Technically I'm the one who's going to have the nightmares," you say dejectedly, because Specs isn't enough of a separate entity to have his own dreams.
"If we can't go to Fluttershy with the problem... we still need to find somepony we can talk to. Don't try to stick this out with just you, me and the guys! We've already established this is beyond all of us!"
"I'm really not sure I need help with it, per se. Maybe I just need to know it's there and compensate for it – Ow!" Specs has hit you in the snout with a rolled-up newspaper.
"No! Bad Discord! We need help or you're going to get us all killed!" Specs sighs. "I know how much you don't want to go to anyone else with your problems. I don't either! But I don't want to fade out of existence, either!"
"Well, neither do I!"
"Good! Then do something!"
Specs demanifests himself, leaving you alone with your thoughts, which right now is a bad place to be. You still haven't slept since the night before last, and you probably should go to bed – after the stress of the day you've had, you're definitely very tired. But you don't want to stop the chaos and stop moving and open yourself up to dreams, or to the silence and stillness of sleep, not right now. Normally you'd go to Fluttershy when you feel this way and crash on her couch, but you don't want to impose and you don't want to worry her with the knowledge of how badly shaken you are and you don't want to hear another lecture about how you should tell Twilight all about your problems.
Instead, you teleport into Pinkie's room, into her bed, and pull her into a hug. Pinkie's not interested in you romantically or sexually, and you've been burned too many times by trying to get it on with one of your own cognates from another dimension to want a relationship with anyone as chaotic as you are, but right after the Tirek thing when Pinkie was living in Twilight's castle and Twilight still hadn't ironed out exactly how she was going to go about spreading Friendship, you lived there too and Pinkie spent more time in your bedroom, treating you as a living bed while you treated her like a living plushie, than she did in her own.
"Discord?" Pinkie doesn't sound impossibly bright and cheery, for once. "I gotta get up in the morning..."
"I'm not here to talk," you tell her. "I just..."
"Did something bad happen with the tea party with Fluttershy?"
"Sort of. Not really. Yes. I'll tell you about it tomorrow. Fluttershy was wonderful but. Um."
"What did you do?" she asks, in the tone of a pony scolding a naughty dog who'd chewed a hat.
"Not like that! I did something stupid, but not the usual way I do something stupid, and... I'll tell you about it tomorrow. Nothing bad happened between Fluttershy and me, it was all something that happened to me, but... I, um, don't want to go to sleep."
"Oh! So you need a pony plushie to sleep with!"
"More or less."
"Okay." She snuggles back against you. "Your Aunt Pinkie has it all under control. I am a great plushie."
You grin in the dark. "I know, Pinkie."
And then her breathing evens out and just like that, she's asleep again. She's soft and she's fluffy and she's solid and warm, a comforting weight in your arms. You wish she was Fluttershy instead, but if she was you'd have a much harder time keeping your emotions under control and actually getting to sleep.
For a while you stare into the darkness, remembering what it felt like to disappear into nothing, until the warmth of the pony sleeping next to you and the rhythm of her breathing finally lull you to sleep.
