! (The Song Formerly Known As)
'! (The Song Formerly Known As)'
It is a bright and cheerful day in Ponyville. Celestia's sun shines in a cloudless sky, as it often does. It is, however, less bright and significantly less cheerful in the tangle of the Everfree Forest, which is where our story will be taking place.
We begin with following a bright pink earth pony, with a great curly mane like a mass of candy floss and a tail to match. Her name is Pinkie Pie, and as she travels from her home in Ponyville above Sugarcube Corner to the Everfree Forest she doesn't trot or canter or gallop: she bounces, seeming lighter than air, and hums a happy tune. Pinkie Pie is the kind of pony who is always cheerful, cheerful as the Ponyville weather; she is friends with everypony she knows, and always has a smile for each of them.
As she passes into the shadow of the wild forest, her spirits do not dampen. Her song continues uninterrupted. If she has concerns about the untamed flora or fauna that dwell here, she does not show them. For today, Pinkie is a mare with a mission.
It is in the Everfree Forest that Discord has been living; its wild and untamed ways suiting his mostly wild and mostly untamed nature. The draconequus has forged for himself... well, perhaps you would not call it a home, or even so much as a dwelling, but he has carved out a patch of the self-governed forest to call his own. Each time a pony visits it could change structure and form, from a grand mansion to a rustic shack to an empty field with a single dandelion; it is not uncommon in this place for strange phenomena to occur, like the rivers flowing upstream, pigs suddenly taking flight, or clocks repeatedly striking thirteen. This weird locale is Pinkie's destination.
She enters the clearing, today populated by stone slab monoliths and a great sundial, and calls in her customary exuberant and high-pitched voice: "Discooord! Are you hoo-oome?"
The mismatched draconequus emerges from one of the standing stones clad in a robe and fuzzy slippers, his lion's paw clutching a steaming mug of coffee. His wild eyes widen as he lays them on his visitor. "Why, Miss Pie!" he exclaims. "Such unexpected company, and here's me looking like a mess." He snaps the talons of his claw to transform his attire into a dapper suit, which promptly peels itself away from him and walks off into the forest on its own. "What brings you by my humble abode? Planning to throw me a party? Turn me to stone?"
"No, nothing like that, silly." Now her determination falters slightly; what she has come to say is difficult to formulate. "Discord, I..." she begins, then glances away, cheeks reddening. She screws her eyes shut, and exclaims: "Discord, I've come to confess my feelings to you!"
She takes a deep breath and charges forward, heedless of the chaos spirit's shocked expression.
"I've always secretly liked you," she continues. "Will you be my special somepo... uh, somedraconequus?"
Discord places a talon on his chin in consideration. "You know, it's strange," he says, "of all the ponies in Ponyville, it's you, Pinkie Pie, I have felt a special connection to, and until now haven't been able to put a finger on just what..." He trails off as if struck with a sudden bout of amnesia, and shakes his head vigorously.
"Hm?" Pinkie asks.
"What am I saying?" Discord shouts. "This is completely out of character! And with absolutely no development to boot."
"Are you saying... you don't like me that way?" Pinkie's lower lip trembles.
"No!" Discord grabs her shoulders. "Just think for a second. Why is it, exactly, that suddenly you find me simply irresistible, that I light up your life, that you've got a bad case of lovin' me?"
"Well, it's..." Pinkie's brow furrows, and then a bright expression blossoms across her face so quickly one could almost hear the 'ding!' of a bell. "I don't know!" She gives a bright smile. "Isn't that weird?"
"Unsettling is the term I was thinking of using." Discord places an arm behind his serpentine back and strides with the grace of a lawyer asking a rhetorical question. "Have you eaten anything unusual in the last seventy-two hours? Princess Twilight hasn't been messing about with unfinished spells again, has she?"
"No and no. Unless three trays of triple-chocolate muffins with chocolate chips and chocolate frosting is unusual."
"That seems quite within the boundaries of 'usual'. Hmm..."
Once again, Pinkie's face lights up. "Hey! Chocolate rain!"
"Excusez-moi?" Discord quirks an eyebrow.
"I really liked it when you made it rain chocolate! Maybe that's why I thought I liked you liked you."
"That seems a tad flimsy." Discord strokes his tuft of beard. "I thought you disliked me as much as the rest of your gang of six."
"Not really." Pinkie shrugs. "I don't dislike anypony. Anydraconequus. Hey, are there other draconequusuusuuses?"
"As far as I am aware," Discord says as a second Discord, wearing dark sunglasses and a downturned fedora, peeks his head around one of the monoliths and puts a shushing finger to his lips, "I am the only one."
"Well, I don't dislike you anyway."
"I recall you getting rather mad, pre-reformation."
"You made all those balloons laugh at me!"
"And in the spirit of being a changed embodiment of chaos, I say that I am sorry." Discord spreads his hands in apology. "Anyway, I was thinking of you seeming fine with the idea of me as a garden statue for another thousand years."
"Everypony else was being mad, sometimes it's fun to get angry and makes angry faces!" Pinkie makes an angry face to demonstrate. "Grr! See?" She giggles. "But you're pretty fun to have around. I'm sure I would have appreciated all the chaos around Ponyville if it wasn't as disruptive and I wasn't a grey grumpy grumbly discorded downer-pants."
Discord takes a moment to reflect. Could it be that there is some connection between the two of them? They do share a love of the unpredictable and a penchant for defying the laws of the universe -- could that be fertile ground for seeds of romance?
"Aha!" Discord exclaims. "Aha! It's not anything we did! There's some outside force dictating our actions, some unseen narrator putting suggestions in our heads. Don't think I don't see what you're doing!" He raises a fist to the sky, as if daring the author of his current life to make their presence known.
The narrator, if indeed they do exist, makes no sign of their presence.
"What was that about?" Pinkie asks, her head cocked to one side.
"We're being controlled by someone," Discord whispers. "Some invisible puppeteer whose only goal is to have the two of us make kissy faces at each other, and I will not play into his hands!"
"How are you sure it's a he?"
"Trust me, it's a he. Anyway, I won't stand for it!" Discord falls to the ground, sitting cross-legged. "The only sneaky manipulator of fate and the narrative around here should be me," he mutters.
Seeing Discord so upset resonates with Pinkie. She too understands what it's like to be denied your identity, to question your very sense of self. The urge to comfort the draconequus is very strong.
"Heeey, I think I know what you're talking about!" She bounds over to Discord. "That narrator guy, he totally wants me to give you a hug because you're about to get down in the dumps."
"Now he's working on you too? Oh, wonderful." Discord rolls his eyes, then shouts to nobody, "Leave her alone, you hack!"
A twinge of emotion works in Pinkie's chest at the notion of Discord wanting to defend her against this unseen assailant.
"I caught that!" Discord cries. "We're on to you!"
"Yeah!" Pinkie joins in, shaking a hoof at the air.
"And you can't finish this little tale of yours if we're not around to be in it!" Discord pulls a black mass from an invisible pocket, unfolding it on the ground to create a hole leading off into blackness. He grabs Pinkie's waving hoof and dives into the hole with an echoing "sayōnara!" as a farewell.
We travel into the black hole with them, swirling through time and space, sparks of light and flashes of matter passing us by at rapid speeds. We're deposited underneath a temporary blanket tent, hiding one violently pink earth pony and one hunched-over draconequus. Discord switches on a convenient flashlight, illuminating his face from beneath with strange shadows.
"I thought that would work better than it did." He sighs. "Where are we, anyway?"
"My bedroom," Pinkie says. "I thought we could hide under the covers."
The implications of being under the covers with Pinkie Pie causes Discord's mind to wander.
"No it doesn't!" he exclaims.
"You know," Pinkie says, her voice slower and more thoughtful than what is customary, "maybe we should just do what the narrator wants."
"He's not making you say that, is he?"
"No, no," she says with a patient smile, "but usually the best way to get things like this over and done with is to just go along with it. Sometimes it's even kinda fun!"
"You mean..." Discord recoils, aghast. "...This narrative intrusion, it's happened to you before?"
"Oh, sure! Loads of times. I've done all sorts of crazy stuff I'd never normally do! Sometimes I'm sad, or crazy, or really crazy, or in a different place or in a different body, but it ends and then I'm back to being me again."
"And... you're okay with that?"
"Why wouldn't I be? It's like a daydream. It's not really real."
"And you always end up... you, when it's over?"
"I haven't not been me yet."
Discord is silent for a long while, then says with great reluctance: "Okay, you out there. What is it that you want out of us?"
A long pause follows. Discord and Pinkie wait beneath the covers, face to face, snout to muzzle, close enough to kiss.
"Oh, is that all?" Pinkie beams. She closes her eyes and gives Discord a quiet, chaste kiss in the dark beneath her blanket. Discord's eyes widen, then draw themselves closed as if they had a will of their own. When Pinkie eventually draws back, she says in a soft voice, "That wasn't so bad, was it?"
"You know," Discord breathes in a similar whisper, "it wasn't so bad at all." He leans in closer to her. "In fact, I think I could be persuaded to do it again..."
And with that, we leave the two budding lovers to--
"Oh no you don't, bucko," Discord growls. "You can't pick the song and then leave halfway through the dance. C'mere Pinkie, we'll show this two-bit author they can't pull a fade to black on us!"
"Yeah!" Pinkie leaps on Discord, covering his scruffy face with passionate kisses. The pair tangle in the covers, heedless of the amount of both mess and noise they may be making. Their cheeks flush, their pulses quicken, their brows sweat; they are lost in the moment, and we cannot look away. Pinkie's tongue licks the inside of Discord's mouth; Discord responds by grabbing hold of Pinkie's shapely flank, and...
Author's Note
...finally ends the story, as I have to keep the rating to at least Teen. You all are, of course, free to imagine whatever it was that happened next.
Two things. One is that this works as a slightly different form of fourth-wall breaking; instead of characters being self-aware they instead are harassed by a Duck Amuck-esque author. The other is that, despite poking a bit of fun at it, I genuinely think Pinkie and Discord would make a killer couple, potential damage to the universe be damned.
