It always rains at funerals.
Pegasi carted in dark clouds and kicked them just before the ceremony started, letting loose a downpour over that small, flower-covered hill. It must have been a miserable job, Discord mused to himself, to be a weather-pony on funeral duty. Most ponies only had to face death a handful of times in their lives, but for these pegasi, it was their job. Servicing the mourning and the bereaved, day in and day out. It must have been depressing to have to deal with death so often.
Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe, if you spent your whole life surrounding by the grieving and the knowledge of mortality, maybe you just...got used to it. Somehow, Discord decided, that was worse.
The funeral was...nice, in a word. Discord had never really known what made a funeral good. Flowers? A nice coffin? A heartfelt and moving eulogy? If it was the last one, Discord thought, then he had certainly failed his oldest and most cherished friend. He had wanted to say something meaningful, something to make her proud of him. But no matter how much he was wracked his brain he could not find the words to do justice to what he was really feeling. Anything he came up with seemed hollow and trite, and would certainly be forgotten in a week or two at the most. When the time came, he had only managed to put together three, little words to send his oldest friend off:
“I’ll miss you.”
Maybe she was disappointed in him for that. He hoped not. He hoped that, wherever she was, she knew what those words had meant to him. It may have been short, it may not have been original, but if nothing else, it had been the truth.
Discord felt the rain stop and he looked up to see a purple umbrella levitating over his head. He turned to look at the source of the magic, and saw a familiar, purple Alicorn standing next to him.
“Princess Twilight,” he said, closing his eyes and giving the smallest bow of his head. “I’m glad you could make it.”
“I wouldn’t miss this,” Twilight said. Discord knew that was true. She had been at every other funeral of her friends, there was no reason to believe that this one would be different. But it was different, to him. “How are you holding up?”
Discord sighed. “As well as could be expected,” he said. “I’ll never really understand funerals, you know? They don’t really serve any purpose, and they’re not fun. So, what’s the point?”
“Some ponies get closure from it,” Twilight said, taking a seat next to Discord. “It lets us say goodbye.”
Discord looked at Twilight, his eyes analyzing her still-young face. “Does it help you?” he asked. Twilight stared down at the ground, absentmindedly tracing a hoof in the mud.
“No,” she said. “Not really.” She turned back to look at Discord. “That’s a nice suit,” she said.
“Thank you,” Discord said. It was a simple exchange, the sort that, if it was between anyone else, would probably have been small talk. But Discord could hear the underlying, ‘I noticed that you’re not wearing a polka-dot bowtie and orange blazer’ beneath Twilight’s words. Discord may not have understood it, but apparently there was a proper way to say goodbye to a friend who had passed on, and that meant wearing a very traditional suit. He could bend this much for friendship, he told himself. “So…” he said, deciding that enough idle chatter had passed for him to get to the real reason why Twilight had approached him, “I take it you are here to see how I will react to Fluttershy’s death?”
Twilight’s head tilted, and her expression betrayed nothing. Years of mentorship under Princess Celestia had given her a rather unbreakable poker face, when she wanted it. To think that a few decades ago she had been so bad at lying…“I don’t know what you mean, Discord,” she said. “You’re my friend. Of course I want to know if you’re alright.”
“I’m sure you do,” Discord said, waving his hand and gently brushing aside a few storm clouds from the spot where he and Twilight were sitting. It needed to rain at funerals, but that did not mean he had to be completely soaked. “And I’m sure your concern is genuine. I really am. But you also want to know if Fluttershy was the only thing keeping me from taking Equestria back for myself. If, with her gone, I’m planning to return to my wicked ways and bring about a new age of chaos.” Again, Twilight’s face revealed nothing. “And I’m sure that, ever since that...unpleasantness with Tirek, you and the other princesses have been trying to find a way to reel me in, if I ever decide to go rogue again. For years you’ve probably been quietly working on something to contain me, just on the off chance that you ever needed it.” There it was, a tiny twitch on Twilight’s eyebrow, a small tell to be sure, but enough for Discord to notice. He had been at this game for far too long not to.
“I don’t blame you, Twilight. I would have done the same thing, in your position. It’s always good to have an ace up your sleeve.” With that, Discord pulled a playing card from under his claw and dropped it down to Twilight. It was, of course, an ace. “So, tell me Princess...did you succeed? Did you find something that could stop me if I decided that without Fluttershy this whole ‘friendship’ thing isn’t really worth it? The Rainbow Power, perhaps? Or maybe you managed to put back together the pieces of Chrysalis’ throne? Or did you and that apprentice of yours find a way to tap into the Tree of Harmony and turn me back into stone?”
Not a single tell. Not a facial twitch, not an extra blink, not even an averted glance to tell Discord whether or not she had succeeded. He had to commend her, she was really learning how to play her cards close to the chest. “Am I going to need something like that?” Twilight asked, simply. Her tone was neutral, conversational, like she was asking about the weather, or politely asking about his day. She was either sitting on a royal flush, just waiting for him to call her, or she was bluffing on a hand of mismatched cards she had desperately tried and failed to connect. And for the life of him, Discord could not tell which it was.
But, then again, it hardly mattered.
“No,” he said. “You don’t.”
Despite it all, a small smile made its way to Twilight’s face. “I knew I wouldn’t,” she said.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Discord said, “that was my plan, once. A pony’s life is short. When I first decided to ‘reform’, I told myself, ‘Okay, this pegasus girl is interesting. I like her, I like being her friend, but she won’t be my friend if I turn Equestria into my own personal playground of chaos. So, I’ll behave, for now. I have an eternity to do whatever I want, so why not spend a lifetime or so playing nice with this little pony?’ I really intended to go right back to The King of Chaos the moment she passed on, or got boring to me. She was...a distraction. A way to pass a few decades before getting back to some real chaos.”
Twilight gave an understanding nod, like she had worked all this out years before. “What changed?” she asked.
Discord sighed. “I think...I did. For a while, friendship was a burden with some nice perks. But the more time I spent with her, the more I started to value it for its own sake. Because of her, I made friends with Spike and Big Mac, you, Princess Celestia and Luna...it started to have value on its own. And I won’t disrespect her memory by going back to the way I used to be, just because she’s not here to disapprove of it.”
Twilight placed a hoof on Discord’s shoulder and gave him a warm look. “I’m proud of you, Discord,” she said. “And I’m sure she would be too.”
“I hope so,” he said, sighing. “I hope so…” He closed his eyes. “For whatever it’s worth, I tried to save her. And not just her, either. All of our friends. Pinkie Pie. Rarity. Rainbow Dash. Your brother. I did everything I could to stall their passing. But at a certain point...there wasn’t anything I could do anymore.”
“I know,” Twilight said. Discord gave a puzzled look. This he had not seen coming.
“You knew? How?”
“If you think I haven’t noticed that the average lifespan around here had gone up significantly since you arrived, you clearly don’t know me that well,” Twilight said, giving Discord a playful punch on the arm. “Plus...you haven’t been up to your usual antics for at least thirty years. Oh, occasionally you’ll put on a little show, but nowhere near on the scale that you used to. So, either you got bored of using chaos magic for your own amusement, which was...unlikely. Or, you were using it for something else. Something you thought was more important.”
There was a moment of silence. Twilight was the one to break it. “So, what’s next?” she asked. “Are you going to try to find another pony like her?”
Discord shook his head. “I don’t think that would be possible. And, even if it was...no. I won’t reduce her to an...archetype that way. No, this is what I’m going to do.” Discord stood up. “I am going to go home. And I am going to be sad that my friend is dead. Fluttershy wouldn’t want me to be sad, but I think she’d forgive me for mourning her a little longer.”
Twilight nodded. “I’m sure she would.”
“And then,” Discord said, turning to Twilight and throwing a handful of confetti and streamers from both hands, “I am going to throw this town the biggest party they’ve ever seen. At that animal shelter she loved so much. I’ll make sure that, even with her gone, ponies will still go there, and take care of the animals she cared about.”
“Pinkie Pie would be so proud,” Twilight said.
With that, Discord left. The life of a pony is short, and the life of a Draconequus is very long. They outlive friendships, and to many this may make the whole ordeal seem pointless. But maybe even an impermanent thing can have a permanent impact. Maybe the good a thing can do can outlive the thing itself.
Fluttershy was never one for ostentation. Discord did not hang her picture in the stars as a constellation or carve her face into a mountain, to ensure that no one would ever forget her. Many would not even know that she had existed. This is not a terrible fate, most ponies pass without the world knowing about them, and the impact that they made. And for a shy pony that shirked away from the spotlight, a peaceful, private rest was far more respectful than having her name echo throughout eternity. But she would be remembered, even if it was only by one, and the impact she had on him would follow him like a whisper. A conscience for a god.
Author's Note
Okay, so...I really struggled with whether or not I wanted to publish this. I really want to write fan fiction that makes people smile, and this is...the opposite of that, probably. But I couldn't get the idea out of my head, so I decided to put it to paper, and I decided...why not? It's not a terribly original idea, but I couldn't find an example of an implementation of it quite like this one, so I figured I'd put it up and see what people thought.
For those of you who are reading for my normal stories, have no fear, this is outside of the Prep-Verse (a name I'm shamelessly stealing from River Road). Anyways, I hope you enjoy this brief little detour from my normal writing style! Thanks for reading!
