No Escape From Yourself chp 4 (inc) (Patreon)

  (Why is this chapter 4 when I have actually published 7 chapters? Because I'm alternating between long third person story stretches which get chapter numbers, and un-numbered journal entries and other short pieces. I've been working on this since mid-April and I've only gotten this far.)

Fluttershy was returning today. Discord could barely contain his excitement. When Pinkie Pie said that she and the others would be meeting Fluttershy at the train station, Discord quickly interjected, “I’ll go with you!”

“Sure, but you know Fluttershy! She doesn’t like a fuss made over her in public! So no balloons, confetti, tubas, flugelhorns, banners, drumrolls, cannons, or anything else like that!”

Discord actually knew that, but he made a face, and produced a very tiny cannon in the palm of his hand. “Not even a tiny one?” he mock-pouted.

“Not even a tiny one! I tried that one year and Fluttershy flew off and hid and she left all her bags at the train station! We had to carry them home for her!”

That, Discord hadn’t known. “I knew she was shy, but I didn’t know she was ever that shy.” He shook his head. “Was this around the same time she screamed and tried to hide from the stained glass window of me?”

Pinkie gave him an odd look. “You know why she did that, right?”

“Because she was a gigantic scaredy-kitten?”

“She told us later that she looked at the stained glass window and she felt like… it was angry, and full of malice, and it wanted to hurt us. Like somepony might feel if he’s been trapped in a statue for a thousand years and now he sees the only ponies who could put him back there and he wants to do something bad to their heads to make them not be friends so they can’t do that thing, right?”

“Are you telling me…” Discord’s brow furrowed, and he stared at Pinkie with an expression halfway between disbelief and concentration. “I was inside that window at the time. Are you telling me she could tell?”

“That’s what we think!” Pinkie said, nodding. 

He’d known the alicorn and the unicorn mage in the room hadn’t been heart-readers, like Cadance, so he hadn’t done anything to magically conceal his emotional state. The thought that a pegasus would be able to sense him lurking within the glass had never occurred to him. “That’s very impressive,” he said, wishing he’d known that before he’d decided to betray her. A pegasus who could heart-read, even under very limited circumstances and maybe only against those who weren’t her species, was a lot more interesting, inherently, than a centaur who could steal magic.

“Anyway it happened the year before that, I think,” Pinkie said. “She was going to Dizzyworld down in the Hayseed Swamps to talk the alligators into staying away from the park, and she got the park to make them their own protected area that the park would stock with fish for them, and from all I hear she did just fine but then when she got home it was nothing but panic attacks for three days.” She shrugged. “I tried to cheer her up but everything I did made things worse and Rainbow had to tell me we had to leave her alone because she needs to be able to take time off from being near ponies at all before she could calm down and socialize. I think she’s better at it now that she’s been friends with us for a while but that wasn’t too long after we all met and became friends! I mean Dashie and Fluttershy were already friends, and I was already friends with Applejack because she always used to bring deliveries to Sugarcube Corner because we don’t make apple pies, that would compete with Sweet Apple Acres, but we do make fancy apple pastries like brittanies and danishes and stuff, and we buy zap apple jam to put in ponies’ sandwiches, and I used to talk to Rarity when she would come in to buy cupcakes because sometimes when a pony is inspired and she’s been working all day she needs a cupcake to keep her energy up—”

Discord pressed a talon against Pinkie’s lips. “Enough, Pinkie. I get the idea.” He wasn’t going to tell her that he’d known all this already, that he’d used every tool available to him in stone to spy on her and her friends from the date of the Rainboom and Twilight’s hatching of Spike; he’d known, that early, that those six ponies were destiny-entangled and almost certainly intended to be his future opponents as Bearers of Harmony. He’d been watching as they made friends with each other, waiting for the day when they were all together, because he’d been sure they’d end up with the Elements of Harmony as soon as they were all in direct contact with each other, and as soon as that happened, he’d known the balance would shift and he could start working on breaking out of his prison in earnest. It didn’t really seem politic to him to talk to his friends about the days when they were his enemies, not now.

And so he went with the rest of the group – all five of the Bearers, plus Spike – to pick Fluttershy up at the train station. Against his will, he remembered the last time Fluttershy had gone somewhere by train, by herself, and he’d been desperate for her to return – when he’d gotten sick with a mutated version of the blue flu, after giving himself the blue flu in the first place, and then a tatzlwurm had suppressed his magic and the flu viruses that had mutated from proximity to his chaos magic had made him incredibly ill. Twilight and Spike and Cadance and Pinkie Pie had all gone out of their way to help him and take care of him, before Fluttershy got him… and he’d repaid them all by letting Tirek take their magic.

Everything nowadays reminded him of his own guilt.

***

After what seemed like it had to have been three or four hours, but was according to Rarity and her elegant diamond-studded timepiece on a chain only a few minutes, the train pulled in. Discord was floating, unable to stay on the ground from excitement. At least he was managing not to bounce. Pinkie Pie had that angle covered, sproinging up and down in place.

Several other ponies disembarked. Fluttershy was one of the last to come out. “Fluttershy!” Rainbow yelled, before anyone else could say anything – though Pinkie Pie began yelling “Fluttershy!” repeatedly a second after Rainbow did, bouncing as she did so. Rainbow continued over Pinkie. “Great to see you’re back! Can I take your bags?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Rainbow, I should take Fluttershy’s bags,” Discord interjected, teleporting between Fluttershy and Rainbow so that Rainbow’s dive toward Fluttershy resulted in her smacking into Discord’s chest instead.

“Oh, it’s fine, I can manage my own bags,” Fluttershy said. “Please don’t fight over it.”

“How did things go?” Twilight asked.

“They’re rebuilding everything quickly, which is good. There’s a few animals who were scared enough that they didn’t want to come back to the zoo, but I think I managed to talk them into it.” Fluttershy was plainly struggling a bit with her valise.

“Fluttershy, just let me carry your bag,” Discord said, reaching for the valise by stretching his arm to a ridiculous length.

Fluttershy shook her head. “It’s fine,” she said, not looking at him. “A little exercise won’t hurt me. The real problem was the lion; she was very hungry, and obviously, to a hungry lion, ponies look like food. It was hard to convince her to come back without pouncing on anypony.”

“Oh my goodness! That sounds so frightening!” Rarity said.

“Not really. I mean, it’s a little frightening, because you never know if the animal is going to listen to you, in the end. Usually they do, though. And eating a living pony, well, you’re going to have to bite through a tough hide, covered with a coat –”

Spike looked slightly green. “That doesn’t sound tasty,” he agreed.

“Whereas if you come back to the zoo, you get delicious tuna steaks, and turkey, and we train the lions to prefer those kinds of foods to ponies. It’s what they’re used to.”

“I suppose lions aren’t very adventurous in their diets?” Discord asked.

“They’re really not,” Fluttershy said, still not looking at him, but at least she was talking to him. 

Applejack said, “Still, it’s kinda worrisome to think about a lion loose in Manehattan. Especially a hungry one. What if there’d been a foal around where the lion could get her?”

“That’s why they wanted me to come,” Fluttershy said. “It was very important for ponies’ safety but also the lion’s safety to get her back to the zoo; an earth pony mother defending her foal from a lion might, um, well, earth ponies are very strong, and a hoof could do a lot of damage to the poor lion, and then you imagine what a unicorn might do, so it’s really best for the lion to be in the zoo.”

“You should have asked me for help,” Discord said. “I could have snapped up some raw red steaks. Lions love those.”

“Um, yes, but there’s two problems with that,” Fluttershy said. “The first is, we don’t want the lion learning to like red meat. Cows are made of red meat. Ponies are made of red meat.”

“How do you know what color the meat of a pony is?” Twilight asked. “I mean, as far as I know only griffins care about the color of a meat source, and griffins don’t eat ponies anywhere in the world.”

“That you know of,” Discord intoned ominously.

“And secondly, Princess Celestia said you have to stay in Ponyville, so you couldn’t have gone to the zoo in Manehattan even if it wouldn’t have been, um, not the best idea for other reasons.” She glanced at him, but briefly, so briefly. 

“I thought everypony knew that ponies are red meat!” Pinkie said. 

“Uh, no, Pinkie, why is that a fact anyone needs to know? How do you know it?” Twilight asked.

“Pinkie knows a lot of weird stuff you can’t figure how or why she knows it,” Applejack said. “You’ll drive yourself plumb crazy trying to figure that out, Twilight, I thought you knew by now.”

“Anyway, darling, we’ve got your usual travel decompression kit waiting back at your house,” Rarity said. “Pinkie brought over a cake, and Applejack’s going to make you some warm fritters, and I’ve got a new plush bathrobe and a hot lavender bath waiting for you, and Spike’s volunteered to give you a back massage if you need one.”

“I did?” Spike said. “I mean, yes, of course I will!”

Discord glared down at him. “I hardly think that’s appropriate,” he said. “Fluttershy has more than one friend with fingers, and I’m much stronger than Spike, and I have magic.”

“It’s fine,” Fluttershy said. “I really don’t need a back massage. The hot bath will be fine.”

“I could snap you up some bubble bath soap,” Discord said desperately. “Cherry almond scented? With scrubbing bubbles? That hum?”

“That sounds perfectly nice,” Fluttershy said. “You can do that if you want to. As long as the humming isn’t very loud.”

“They could make bird sounds instead…”

“No, that would just confuse my bird friends.”

“Can you imagine?” Pinkie said, giggling. “What if your friend was in the bath and the bath kept saying things like ‘Purple seventeen donut bus’? Or ‘whiskers time for jogging basket?’”

“What about ocean sounds? Ponies like the sound of the ocean, don’t they?”

“I went to the ocean once,” Fluttershy said, and shuddered. “It was so big. Oh, but I did see some very nice crabs, and a starfish.”

“Let’s let Fluttershy get back to her house so she can get some food and a bath to get the travel dust off,” Twilight said. “And I’m sure she’ll want to take a nap. Discord, I want you to come back to the palace with me to consult on making a magical field that can keep animals with predatory intent out but will let other animals in. Rainbow, how about you take Fluttershy’s bag straight to her house for her? Rarity, Applejack, I know you’re going to want to help Fluttershy settle in. Pinkie, if you’ve already dropped off the cake then why don’t you and Spike go to the market and get more eggs? If you’re going to do this pancake thing a lot, you’ll want more eggs than we have. And maybe blueberries, or chocolate chips.”

“Or blueberries and chocolate chips!”

It did not escape Discord’s notice that Twilight had gone out of her way to keep Fluttershy’s two most extroverted and high-energy friends away from going to her house with her. Part of him resented the very obvious manipulation and the implications that lay behind it. But… he really did want Twilight to consult with him about magic questions. And the magical field she was talking about was the one Pinkie had said they would set up for Fluttershy to have a garden at the palace, and… it was also obvious that Fluttershy didn’t really want to talk to him right now. He snapped his talons. “The bubble bath will be waiting for you as soon as you’re ready, Fluttershy,” he said. “Lead on, Twilight.”

***

“…thinking that we can tie into the harmonic field of the palace to check intent, so if your intent doesn’t harmonize with the purpose of the garden, it won’t let you in,” Twilight said… he thought, anyway. He’d stopped paying attention as soon as she started talking about integrating harmony into the spell. “What do you think?”

“Fine, fine,” he said absently, wondering if Fluttershy would appreciate it if he put his new thinking tree in her garden. He’d first created the thing back when he’d been living at the palace in Equupolis with Celestia and Luna, when he’d been a teenager; back then he’d made it by using chaos magic to modify the seed, because he hadn’t been strong enough to just constantly make things out of nothing, but since he’d become the chaos avatar he’d just snapped his thinking tree into existence every time he’d wanted it around.

“Discord, are you even paying attention to me?”

Discord scowled at her. “What do you think?”

“I thought you wanted to help!”

“I did want to help! Until you made it clear that you’re going to do the whole thing with harmonic magic, which, in case you have forgotten that I am the Spirit of Disharmony, I cannot in any way, shape or form do anything with!”

“Well, you haven’t made any other suggestions!”

“How am I supposed to suggest anything to you when it’s obvious you know everything?”

Twilight sighed explosively. “If I thought I knew everything why would I have asked for your help?”

“To keep me from bothering Fluttershy while she’s recovering from her trip,” Discord said, more of the bitterness he felt about it showing in his voice than he’d really intended. “Oh, I’m sorry, were you trying to be subtle about that?”

Twilight winced. “I’m not just—”

“Maybe not just,” Discord interrupted, “but are you going to try to deny that your main reason for asking me to come help you right then was to keep me away from Fluttershy?”

“I haven’t forgotten how you whined and complained when I tried to give Fluttershy time to recover from her trip before dealing with you when you were sick.”

“Yes, well, I was sick! I’m not sick now! I’m perfectly capable of grasping that ponies need rest and that travel is stressful for Fluttershy. You could have just asked me.” He shook his head. “Twilight, you’re no Celestia. Don’t try to be manipulative. You’re terrible at it.”

“I’m not manipulating you, I’m just… trying not to be rude. I know how you feel about Fluttershy and I didn’t want to have to tell you that you are much too much for her to deal with right now. She really does consider you a good friend, but she just can’t handle someone like you right now. She can’t handle Pinkie and you’re a lot more than Pinkie. And you’re emotionally needy and you’re clingy, when it comes to Fluttershy. So I wanted to give you something to distract your mind from wanting to go bug her, since she needs a chance to rest. And I didn’t want to be rude about it by spelling everything out like apparently I have to because you think I’m trying to manipulate you.”

Discord sighed. “I hate to break this to you, but that is exactly what manipulation is. You can tell me that I need to back off for Fluttershy’s sake; you don’t need to lie to me to make me feel better.”

“I wasn’t lying to you, though. I do want your input.”

“Well, if you want my input, then stop assuming you’re going to do this with harmony.”

“It’s not as if anyone but you can do it with chaos.”

“No, but if you want my advice, perhaps you should remember that there are in fact more than two kinds of magic in the world.” He lifted into the air and coiled himself.  “In point of fact, solving this particular problem would be considerably easier with using disharmony magic than harmony magic.”

Twilight frowned. “Why would that be?”

“Because a creature who comes into this garden intent on taking prey is acting in harmony with its nature, because it’s a predator who takes prey to survive, but in disharmony with the desires of the other creatures in the garden, since it wants to eat creatures who don’t want to be eaten. Harmony magic is, mmm, optimistic – it looks for any source of harmony, because it can build on that. So it’ll detect that the creature is in harmony with its nature and quit looking – harmony found! Everything is delightful! Go ahead and let them in! Disharmony magic is equally optimistic, from disharmony’s perspective anyway – it’ll look for the first source of disharmony it finds, which in this case would be the mismatch of the predator’s desire to kill and eat with the desire of the prey to stay alive. Key the disharmony spell to lock creatures out if there’s any source of disharmony – and put an exception in for ponies, otherwise it won’t let a pony go in the garden if they’re mad at their friend – and you’ll get significantly better results.”

“Huh.” Twilight nodded her head. “That does make sense. But how would I go about casting a disharmony spell? Is it just like dark magic?”

Discord shrugged.  “I couldn’t necessarily say.” He became a tiny child draconequus playing with a rattle. “I’ve been able to access disharmony magic since I was a child.” Back in his adult form, he said, “But I’ve occasionally tried to teach a pony. It never goes well, but there are times it’s gone less badly than others. Generally speaking, you access disharmony magic by doing the opposite of what you do to access harmony magic.”

“So… think about fighting with your friends?”

“If that’s what works for you, sure, but all you really need to do is focus on things about other ponies that are different from you. Things that irritate you, things you’re envious of, things you think are great but would rather be caught dead than do them yourself. If you draw mana while you’re focusing on your lack of perfect harmony with other ponies, the mana will be just right for casting a disharmony spell. I think. I’m pretty sure that’s how other ponies did it, anyway.”

“Huh. And then would I cast the spell in reverse, or would I just cast the same spell?”

“I don’t know.” Discord threw his arms up in exasperation. “I’m not a pony! I don’t cast like you do. Your thing with structuring a spell, where you make a framework that will channel the magic into doing exactly what you want? I don’t do that. And if I do do that, it was disharmony magic to begin with so I don’t need to worry about how to convert it from harmony.” He massaged his temple with his lion paw. “I think… I don’t know. There were symbols in the structure that the ponies casting disharmony would flip, and others they would leave alone. Experiment with it.”

“Are there any books about it?”

He cocked his head and his eyebrow, widening his larger eye and squinting his smaller one. “Twilight Sparkle. I was in stone for a thousand years or so. When I reigned, there weren’t any books, that I knew about anyway. Since then Celestia has been in charge of what magic gets studied in this country. Do you seriously think she’d allow there to be books on disharmony magic?”

“You have a point,” Twilight conceded, and then brightened. “But the Crystal Empire! There’s a vast library there in the palace of works about magic, including stuff that deals with dark magic and chaos magic. They haven’t even begun to catalog all of it. Maybe there’s something about disharmony magic there!”

Discord pursed his lips and nodded. “I really wasn’t able to get into the Crystal Empire much. That whole Heart thing, you know. And I know Sombra hoarded books on magic like dragons hoard gems. So, yes, if there’s anything anywhere written down about how a pony can cast disharmony magic, it would probably be there.”

“You can read really fast.” Twilight paced around excitedly. “Or well, not read fast but you can read a lot of books at the same time. Maybe we could go to the Crystal Empire and you could help me look for a book?”

“I hope you’re not talking about right now. I do want to see Fluttershy as soon as she’s recovered from her trip.”

“Sure, we don’t have to do it right away. I’ve got something to think about now, and a plan to work up.” She continued to pace. “I need to think. Do you want to help Pinkie and Spike with the groceries?”

“I’ll help them eat them if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, if you don’t want to help them get the groceries, I don’t want to give you busywork and I’m sure you have things you’d like to do.”

I certainly do, if I was only allowed to do them, or felt right about doing them, he thought. “Tired of me already, Princess?”

“I need to do some thinking, and that means I need to be by myself, without interruptions. So it’s not that I’m tired of you, it’s that I figure you’d be really bored if I made you sit down and be quiet and not draw attention to yourself, which is what I’d need from you if you were going to stay here—”

Discord made a face. “No thank you. I’ll go find something to entertain myself.” If I slip over to an alternate reality but it’s still Ponyville, does that actually count as leaving Ponyville? 

As usual, stepping outside the harmonics made him feel so much better, he wondered why he ever went inside the palace. As usual, he had no idea what he was going to do with his time. He desperately wanted to go talk to Fluttershy now that she was back, but he knew she’d need a nap and some relaxation time before she was ready to interact with friends. Part of him insisted he should go do it anyway, but he really didn’t want to upset her, not when things between them were so precarious anyway.

Terrible ideas presented themselves to him, and he shot them down, but with increasing reluctance. What if he made himself sick again and then Fluttershy would have to take care of him? What if he pretended to have been made ill by Tirek taking his magic because he was the spirit of chaos and his magic was a more integral part of his existence than pony magic was? No, that presented the obvious “serves you right” commentary. Maybe Fluttershy wouldn’t say that, but what if she thought it? No, no, can’t do any of that. All right, what if he went to an alternate timeline? If there was still a Ponyville in the other timeline, could Celestia really accuse him of having left Ponyville? (Answer: yes. The ward would detect that he wasn’t present in this Ponyville; it would have no way of sensing that he was in a different one. Also, did he really want to risk running into another Discord?) What if he traveled in time? He could go back far enough that this was Equupolis again, and wear his Twister disguise or some other pony shape, and… not do anything, because he hadn’t done anything, because his ability to alter the past was really, really limited. Okay, new plan. What if he just said “screw Celestia” and went wherever he wanted?

That one was a lot harder to reject than it should have been. No small part of him argued that he outranked Celestia, that he was more powerful, that he was the Avatar of Chaos, a cornerstone of magic itself in Equestria and all throughout the world, and taking orders from ponies, even pony princesses, was beneath him. 

He reminded himself of Celestia’s face as Tirek threw her into Tartarus, as she hugged him and begged him not to disappoint her again, as he gave her candy flowers from their childhood. He wasn’t obeying Celestia because he was a herd creature like a pony, mindlessly following authority; he was obeying Celestia because he wanted to win back her trust, and the trust of the ponies who were Fluttershy’s friends and maybe his own. Because he’d screwed up in a major way and he didn’t want to be the bad guy again.

None of this answered the question of what he could do to entertain himself until Fluttershy could see him.

***

He wandered aimlessly through Ponyville, committing very small acts of chaos. Zucchini at the market stand yelling “Pick me! Pick me, I’m freshest!” at ponies. Statues with hats on tipping them to passersby. Birds singing as if they were guitars or keyboards. Lampposts taking a little stroll. Tiny things. Harmless things, that reset themselves as if nothing had happened – even the lampposts strolled back to where they had originally come from. But ponies glared at him like he was unleashing a full-on storm of chaos, like he was chasing them down to have Tirek steal their magic, right now.

It wasn’t worth it. The chaos didn’t make him feel better. It made him feel like everyone was looking at him, which normally he loved, but they were looking at him with disgust and anger and they were right. He didn’t know how to handle that. They’d always been wrong in the past, laughably wrong, and he could enjoy the attention as they all stared at him because he knew how great he was and how much better it was to be him than to be a pony. But he really had done something terrible. He hadn’t taken anypony’s magic, but he’d enabled Tirek, and that had been just as bad. 

Well. He had bits. He went to Sugarcube Corner and ordered a soufflé. Chaos was very bad at making a proper soufflé. Mr. Cake trembled and his knees knocked together, but Discord had come by to visit Pinkie often enough that Mr. Cake seemed to be sort of used to him by now. And the soufflé was delicious.

By the time he was done, and had headed back to Twilight’s castle, Pinkie and Spike had returned. Discord wandered back into the castle. The harmonics hurt his head, but the possibility of seeing some chaos he didn’t have to feel guilty about was compelling, now that he was so very very bored.

***

After asking Twilight and Pinkie about six times “Do you think Fluttershy is ready for visitors yet?”, he finally managed to get a “Probably, you should go check!” from Pinkie, and he was off.

“Fluttershy!” He popped into her living room, arms spread wide. “My best buddy! How are you!”

Fluttershy was on the couch, in a bathrobe, Angel Bunny cuddled in her lap and an assortment of chocolate sweets on the end table. She was reading a book that she hastily closed before Discord had a chance to see much of it, but it looked like it was full of pictures, like one of Spike’s comic books. “Hello, Discord,” she said, with much less of her usual cheer in her voice. “I’m still very tired from my trip.”

“But you have time for your best friend, right?”

A weak smile. “I’ll always try to make some time for you, Discord. Would you like some tea?”

“I would!” As she started to get up, he waved her down. “No need to put yourself out for me, I know how to put your tea kettle on. You’re tired! You should rest your hooves!” He magicked up a plush ottoman covered with thick, soft fur. It opened its eyes, which were in the side facing Fluttershy. They were big, expressive eyes, looking up at her warmly. 

“Oh, how cute!” Fluttershy said. 

“Put your hooves on him,” Discord said. “He’ll purr and give you a hoof massage.”

“I do want to try that.” Fluttershy leaned forward to put her hooves on the ottoman. Angel angrily chittered at her. “Angel, Discord is my guest and you need to accept that. Now quiet down or go play by yourself.” The rabbit glared at Discord, but didn’t make a further sound.

Fluttershy put her forehooves on the ottoman. As Discord had promised, it purred, loudly, with a visible vibration. “Oh, that does feel nice. Will he mind if I put my back hooves on him?”

“Not at all! He loves it when ponies do that!”

As Fluttershy got a hoof massage from the ottoman, Discord floated into the kitchen and put on Fluttershy’s tea kettle. He could snap up boiling water, but Fluttershy insisted that he do this the long way, with actual boiling water, and he didn’t mind that much; the boiling point of water was predictable but the pattern of the bubbles was chaotic. Likewise, he could have created a tea with magic, but he preferred the taste of the teas Fluttershy bought. Randomly he summoned one out of her pantry and put it in a teacup for her. 

He brought the tea out to her when it was done. “Here you go! I have no idea what kind of tea this is, I didn’t pay any attention!”

Fluttershy smiled. “So tell me about what’s been going on with you here.”

He tried to think. Not very many things had happened since Fluttershy had left, and he didn’t want to tell her about the incident with Stellar Eclipse and the lamps. And he certainly didn’t want to tell her about the nightmares. “I had a flying competition with Rainbow Dash.”

“Oh, how nice! She’s warming up to you, then?”

He chuckled. “She only agreed to do it because I promised she could kick me if she won.”

“That’s terrible!” Fluttershy gasped. “But did you win?”

“Oh, no. Your friend is quite remarkable. But she didn’t kick me; she wanted me to make a banner advertising her victory instead.”

“Well, that’s good.” She frowned slightly. “But… I do know Rainbow is amazing, but I can’t see how she could beat you…”

“Oh, it was without magic. Nothing but my flight magic, anyway. I do have that, you know. It’s much easier flying with chaos, but that was the whole point.” He sighed. “I was trying to find something fun to do that didn’t rely on chaos.”

“Was it fun?”

“Fun enough.” 

He found himself telling Fluttershy the story of his brother who could fly. “Hermes! That was his name. How strange, I do know it!”

“Is it really strange that you know your brother’s name?”

“In our language – in the draconequus language – you don’t call your older brother by his name, you call him Older Brother. And all of my brothers were older than me. I don’t remember any of their names, but I must have remembered Hermes because that was what my mother called him.”

She patted his arm. “I’m sure he was proud of you.” Fluttershy looked up at him. “Do you want to talk about things from your childhood? I’m always happy to listen.”

“Eh, it was a long time ago.” Discord shrugged. 

“It’s part of what makes you you, though. We’re friends. I want to understand you.”

So you’ll know if I’m about to betray you again? No. That was uncharitable. Twilight maybe, but Fluttershy was not just pretending to be his friend to manipulate him. “Fluttershy… you know I… I’m really sorry for what I did, right? I don’t know how to make it up to you.”

“It’s all right, don’t worry about it.” She patted his arm again. He wasn’t fooled. There was disharmony surging in her emotional state. Either she was saying something that had no connection to her actual feelings, or her feelings were in violent conflict with each other, or both.

“It’s not all right and I have to worry about it. I know it hurt you, Fluttershy. You don’t have to pretend it didn’t.”

“It’s all right. It hurt me, yes, but that’s in the past now.” She yawned. “Anyway, I’m so sorry, but I’m still very tired. I think we should call it a night, okay? If that’s all right?”

“Of course,” he said, mechanically. He looked down at the end table. She had barely touched the tea he’d made for her. “I can drop in tomorrow if you’re not doing anything too strenuous!”

“I do have a lot of work to do catching up. I’ll need to find out how the animals behaved for the petsitter, and make sure everyone’s been getting the right amount of food…”

“So you don’t want to see me?”

“I told you, I’ll make time for you, but I might not have a lot of it. So feel free to drop by. It’ll be fine. We can spend a few minutes talking at least.”

“Can we talk about… this thing? What I did?”

“There’s no need, it’s all over and done with. Let’s not dwell on it. Good night, Discord, I hope you get a good night’s sleep.”

That was unmistakably a dismissal. “Good night, Fluttershy,” he said in a jovial tone he didn’t feel, and vanished.

***

He was a child, chasing after Older Brother, Hermes, through a forest. “Can’t catch me!” Hermes caroled back at him.

“Yes I can!” Discord called, and changed the position of gravity so that he was falling toward the horizon rather than the ground. He beat his tiny wings hard to slow his terrifyingly fast descent toward his brother in the distance.

“Nope! I’m faster than you! I’m faster than everyone!” Hermes called back to him, and sped up.

All the other draconequui were flying ahead of him. Fluttershy was also there but she was a draconequus. “Wait for me!” Discord yelled. “Slow down!”

“We’re not taking you,” a male draconequus named I Run Things said. “You’re chaos, and chaos is bad and evil. You can’t come with us.”

“Slow down! Mommy! Hermes! Fluttershy! Don’t go with him! Let me come with you!”

But they just kept flying faster and faster, and he tried to fly faster to keep up with them but his wings were so small and so sore. He was falling through the sky toward the horizon but they were far ahead of him, getting smaller and smaller. “Come back! I want to go with you! Come back!”

Then a pony sawed a tree down with a buzzsaw and it hit him and knocked him out of the sky.

***

He opened his eyes. Pinkie was snoring very loudly – his “buzzsaw”. Discord snorted, and snapped his dragon foot because his upper limbs were tangled in a blanket. Her breathing eased, her airways opening up, and she slept on, breathing normally again. 

“Might need to get that looked at, Pinkie,” he whispered. “If you’re snoring, you’re not sleeping well.”

Funny how she managed to wake him up from a nightmare every single night even if she wasn’t trying. He lay on the pillows, looking up at the ceiling, trying to calm down from the dream. I Run Things? What kind of a name was that? He’d dreamed it in the draconequine language, so it was all one word, but still. Dimly he remembered that that guy had actually existed and had always been yelling at him. Wait, wasn’t that the guy who’d given him the name Discord and identified him as the Principle of Chaos? Discord wasn’t sure if he actually remembered that, or if he just remembered remembering that. Starswirl had helped him recover the memories of what had actually happened to the draconequui, some time after he’d come to the palace, but that recovery had happened two thousand years ago and a lot of it had faded. 

He closed his eyes. “Stop having nightmares,” he whispered to himself. “You don’t need to have a nightmare every single night. It’s getting predictable.” Hopefully his magic wouldn’t let him do a thing if it was predictable and boring, even if he was asleep and not in conscious control of it.

At least Tirek hadn’t been in it this time. Discord breathed deeply, trying to banish the dream and get back to sleep.

***

Something was frying. Discord’s nose twitched, and his eyes opened again. He couldn’t remember any dreams after the one about the draconequui, so if he’d had any other nightmares, at least he’d managed to sleep through them.

He got up and wandered into the kitchen, where Pinkie was frying eggs, hash browns, and mushrooms with onions. “Hi, Discord! Do you want some breakfast? If you snap me up some bacons I can fry them for you!”

“Great idea! I could go for some bacons!” Spike put in.

With the harmonics in the palace, Discord could not snap up some bacons. “Naah, I hate repeating myself. I’ll take some mushrooms, though. Do you have pickle relish?”

“Bought some yesterday,” Spike said. “Twilight doesn’t like it, but I love it. Nothing like a hot dog loaded with pickle relish. Sometimes I even marinate rubies in it; really brings out the flavor.”

Discord was dragon enough to know what gems tasted like, though without using magic he couldn’t eat them, and he agreed with Spike that pickle relish would harmonize well with rubies, which was why he would never eat a ruby with pickle relish. “Twilight is sleeping in?”

“She’s not sleeping well lately,” Spike said. “So yeah, she might be sleeping a little late.”

“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”

“Uh, I shouldn’t have to explain this, you were there,” Spike said. “Our tree got blown up? You let Tirek take everyone’s powers? Tirek almost killed us? You don’t think those are good enough reasons to be sleeping badly?”

As Discord himself was sleeping badly for similar reasons, he couldn’t exactly argue against that. He really didn’t know what to say; expressing his regret was too heavy, this early in the morning, but he couldn’t make a joke about it when it was all his fault. “I suppose you have a point,” he said. “And I see you have a new refrigerator?”

“Yup! Best magical cooling on the market. Twilight’s a Princess now, so I figured she deserves the best!” Spike bragged.

“I picked it out!” Pinkie said. “I always wanted one but the Cakes said they didn’t need such an expensive fridge!”

“Look! It’s got an ice cube zone, a chill your vegetables zone, a don’t chill your vegetables any more than you have to because they won’t get ripe if they’re cold but you wanna keep the flies off zone, a dairy zone, a leftovers zone… there’s even a meat zone, but I don’t see us using it for that, really.”

Discord raised an eyebrow. He didn’t really care about the workings of a refrigerator, but a thought had occurred to him. “Fluttershy should have one of these. She needs a meat zone for the fish and insects she feeds to her animals.”

Spike was taken aback. “Fluttershy feeds fish to animals? But fish are animals too! And bugs – butterflies are bugs, so doesn’t she care about them?”

“Nature is nature,” Discord said. “Fluttershy won’t let an animal starve just because its nature requires it to eat other animals. Fish and insects are a lot less sentient than birds and mammals and reptiles, so she’s willing to feed them to carnivores.” He scanned the fridge, wondering if he could make one. With additions, of course. He’d have a sun zone to help ripen fruits and vegetables that needed it, and a water zone to keep lettuce fresh, and maybe he’d make it bigger on the inside. 

The thought occurred to him that it was kind of pathetic to make Fluttershy a better refrigerator than Twilight had when he’d spent three days in the past recovering Twilight’s books. He sagged slightly. On autopilot, he snagged the pickle relish with his tail, and shut the fridge, drooping.

“What’s wrong, Discord?” Pinkie asked. 

“Pinkie, you’re supposed to ask me ‘why the long face,’” Discord said, elongating his face. It was an effort to do the joke against the harmonics, but not such an effort he couldn’t manage it. “And then I say, ‘I’m just feeling a little hoarse’—” here he turned his head into a pony head.

“That’d be funny, but it doesn’t answer my question! Your head got all droopy for a moment!”

“I’m just concerned because there’s not very much pickle relish in here.”

“That’s a donation from Applejack, there’s a whole other bottle Pinkie and I just bought,” Spike said. “You can finish that one up if you want. It’s too apple-y for my taste.”

Pickles and apples? Now that sounded like an interesting flavor combination. He stuck his talon in the jar, licked the relish off, found it as intriguing as he’d hoped, and ended up dumping half of what was left of the jar onto the mushrooms Pinkie gave him.