The Strangest of These

by Carabas

Rating: teen
Tags: Romance, Comedy, Random, Discord, Troubleshoes, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 5608

Call me Troubleshoes. You're probably darned curious to know how a stallion like me ended up scoring with the Spirit of Chaos. Frankly, I ain't so sure either. But I'll explain it as best I can.

Call me Troubleshoes.

You're probably darned curious to know how a stallion like me ended up scoring with the Spirit of Chaos.

Frankly, I ain't so sure either. But I'll explain it as best I can.

Cover art by kretka-fretka. Proofread by Themaskedferret. Written for the Hearts and Hooves Day prompt for the Time Action Glory Challenge! group.

Spanish translation, by SPANIARD-KIWI.

Published 2017-02-13 22:20:01 UTC
Last updated 2017-02-13 22:20:01 UTC

The Strangest of These

Call me Troubleshoes Clyde. Or just Troubleshoes if you’re in a rush. You’d be in good company; it’s what most folks round these parts call me. It ain’t your only option, of course, I’ve got whole stables of alternative denomers folks’ve given me. Like, say, ‘You lumbering natural disaster’. Or ‘Wanted: Severely Reprimanded or Alive’. Or ‘My lovey dovey darlingest.’

Yeah. You bet there’s a story behind that last one.

Pull up a bench and refill your cider. I’ll regale you. Odd turn of phrase, that, since I ain’t sure I ever galed you in the first place, but never mind.

So the whole thing kicks off one night a week, maybe two, since I stumbled into rodeo-clowning and made this accursed luck of mine do something in my favour. I won’t bore you with all the details of that. There was breaking-and-entering into my abode, I got arrested on false charges of foalnapping, national heroes got involved, one of ‘em did the aforementioned arresting, and I discovered my life’s purpose after wallowing in concussed discombobulation for years on years. It were a mighty queer sequence of hours, all things told, and at the end of it, clownery was my trade.

Was it a fix for all of my rotten luck? Nah. There still weren’t an inanimate object about my homestead that didn’t jump at the chance to concuss or entangle or otherwise bedevil me, and all the world’s poisonous critters still loved to make their nighttime nests in my hat. But at least the inanimate objects were shiny and new and mostly working whenever they weren’t assailing me, and the critters were a mite more tolerable than before. I had a regular wage, and ponies now greeted my appearances at rodeos with delighted laughs rather than pitchforks. My life wasn’t exactly a fairytale still, but things were looking up for old Troubleshoes at last.

I was putting one of those shiny new things through its paces the very evening I got my new denomer, a spanking new wood-fired stove. I’d hung up my hat after a busy day’s clowning, had a pot of beans a-boiling, and wasn’t expecting anything untoward that evening whatsoever.

The world’s got its funny ways of punishing that sort of expectation, and no sooner had I settled in when there was a knock at my door.

Never let it be said Troubleshoes Clyde was inhospitable to unexpected guests, even if previous efforts to entertain had often left me yelping on the ground amidst the rubble of my home while the guests skedaddled in terror. I opened the door to greet ‘em, a cloaked earth pony stallion with a large hat. “Can I help you out, partner?” I asked, all courteous-like, but wary. It’d been decades since the last of the Gooseberry Gang got their well-deserved desserting by old Sheriff Clintlock, but it still paid to be careful of bandits in these parts.

My visitor looked up at me from under his broad-brimmed hat, giving me a good look at his face, and he were one of the most peculiar old ponies I’d ever seen, even at just that first glance. His big bright eyes were a vivid yellow-red, what I could see of his hide and mane was a shabby grey, and his patchwork cloak and hat looked like they’d dragged along a mile of rough trail, and then through a mile of rough hedge, and then another mile of rough trail just for good luck. He fixed me with the biggest, sharkiest, most snaggle-toothed grin you could imagine, and he said, “Good day to you, my fine behemoth of a stallion! By sheerest good fortune, would you happen to be the renowned Troubleshoes Clyde?”

Well, that sort of enthusiastic greeting threw me for a loop, as you can well imagine. “Well, uh, I ain’t so sure about the good fortune there, and I wouldn’t exactly call myself renowned,” I said. “But yeah, I’m Troubleshoes. What do you call yourself, stranger?”

“Oh, do permit a mysterious visitor a little mystery … at least, until you help me settle a matter.” And though I thought it was my eyes tricking me at the time, his snaggle-tooth appeared to have sprouted a little snaggle-toothed grin of its own. Grins within grins.

This had started out peculiar, and the stranger’s keen manner and loose allegiance to customary biology was making it peculiarer by the second. But I was no stallion with any business spurning the peculiar, and so I played along as yet. “What matter would that be, then?”

“THIS!” he boomed all of a sudden, like a volcano going off point-blank, and in one blazing instant that left white-hot lines snarling through the air, his form ripped free of his clothes and twisted up into something monstrous. The same fire-coloured eyes skewered me, staring down atop a body that lengthened and writhed like a snake’s, his claws and limbs and horns mis-matched and monstrous. Discord himself had paid me a visit.

I did what anypony sensible’d have done in these circumstances, which was to spring backwards while shrieking like my stallionhood had been dipped in an ice bucket. That stuffed my tail neatly enough into the stove’s open door, and when that sensation occurred and I whirled around to deliver similarly helpful shrieks at my tail’s newfound incandescence, that motion whipped the boiling beanpot clear off the stove. It smashed into one of the stands holding up my ornaments and mementoes and such, and said stand’s splintering was all the warning I received before my great-grandpappy’s lucky half-brick-in-a-sock met me cranium-first, followed shortly by everything else.

The soil from my potted cactuses did end up smothering the fire on my tail, so there was that silver lining at least, but otherwise this was shaping up to be a sadly typical evening. I ain’t even going to discuss where the cactuses themselves landed. Let a rueful mutter of ‘Just my luck’ tell its own story.

I lay smouldering and half-smothered by personal effects amidst a puddle of red-hot beans, helpless to do much save meep pathetically when the creature floated up and over me, leaning in. His eyes filled the world, as hypnotising as any snake’s, and I knew whatever his purpose, whatever he was here to do, it could only end terribly.

His mouth cracked open into a smile wider than smiles should be in a sensibly-run world, and he spoke. “My oh my.”

I meeped unhappily.

“This is even better than I’d imagined!”

I meeped, now tinged with terrified curiosity.

He whipped out a small dog-eared book, flicked through the pages, and studied one bit near the beginning as if trying to read a foreign language. Then he looked directly at me again from across the gulf of inches. “Would you say our eyes are now definitely meeting from across a room?”

I meeped to indicate my acceptance of the notion that that state could now be said to be in effect, potentially, allowing for certain definitions to be in play.

“Excellent! Now we’re courting!”

I paused.

I started gibbering.

“Here!” He snapped the talons of one claw, fixing my place up just like it’d been half a minute ago, helped me to my hooves in a gentlestallionly fashion, and then scooped me up under his other arm as if I weighed nothing. “Allow me to spirit you away back to my humble abode and win your affections with my abundance of charm! Don’t worry about a thing, I’ve been practising.”

Trussed up in the crook of his limb and as helpless as a kitten mid-air, I finally got coherent words back. Or coherent-ish, at any rate. “W - What the actual simmering heck and tarnation and jumpin' jack jehoshaphat are you doi—”

Too late. He spouted a third claw, snapped its digits, and we were gone.

For a long, long, long whirling while, everything tasted turquoise. The caterwauling of violins danced before my vision, and my ears were assailed by the taste of raspberries. Then things got really weird, and either I passed out or my brain just called a strike in protest at its new working conditions. Couldn’t blame it, myself.

When I came to, I found the world crystallising into something almost like sense. The place taking shape around us, like a mound of playdough being frantically sculpted into a palace, looked like the inside of an everyday house at first glance. It had sofas, a fireplace, windows, a door leading through to a kitchen, everything you’d expect.

At a second glance, though, the legs of the sofas had claws at their end, and one of the sofa cushions rose up in a yawn, revealing a big pink tongue. The fire in the fireplace was a pretty shade of teal, and was also upside-down. The world outside the windows tied my eyes in knots when I focused on it. And from the doorway to the kitchen, a gelatinous green blob poked its head out, gave me a look of weary sympathy, and then retreated back inside.

Many questions came to mind, and in their rush to all come out at once, only fragments escaped here and there as they fought for dominance on my tongue. “Wha—but—the tarna—fft—gwuh—why—what?”

“Please, take a seat!” said Discord, letting go of me and beckoning a nearby chair over. It scampered up and yipped happily. “There’s a lot we have to get through, as I understand pony courtship, so just this once, I’ve borrowed a trick from Princess Books and made a checklist so that we know what we’re doing and I get it all right. Would you like a drink, or—no, that would count as plying you with alcohol too quickly, wouldn’t it? Ugh, you ponies and your rituals are so complicated.”

“Mr Discord,” I stammered, trembling where I stood, both from fear and from the chair insistently butting into the back of my rear legs. “Please don’t hurt me or do anything permanent or unnatural to me. I have a family!”

Discord opened his mouth, paused, and frowned. He made a circle with two curled digits, in which a blurry image of my homestead appeared, and he eyed it for a moment like a sea captain peeking through a telescope. “No you don’t,” he said accusingly.

“I … Someday I might!” I tried to shoo off the chair. “Why am I here?”

“Because I brought you. I mean, I know cause and effect in this place is more of an optional suggestion than anything actually binding, but that one’s still in effect, don’t worry.”

Phrasing. Vital life skill. “Why did you bring me here?” I said. “Oh, stars above … what were you saying earlier about ‘courting’?”

“Ah, there’s the point of it all, right there!” He smiled keenly. “Would you like to be the one who wears the cravats or the one who wears the pretty dresses? I look excellent in both, so I’m not fussy.”

Now, some ponies would figure that I ought to have started fighting my way free at this junction, and would have had an easy time of it, being the size that I am. Unfortunately, stature ain’t no cure for being born with the yellowest belly in the Mild West, and my instinct to fight or flight yanked ahold of my whole brain and landed squarely on the latter. But even that wasn’t viable. There weren’t nowhere to fly to that I could see, other than a churning somethingness outside the windows that made my retinas itch.

I gathered my breath and tried to calm down, which wasn’t helped by the fact of Discord still yapping on. “Now, that preference aside, I understand one of us will have to be a strong-willed, witty, and inerrantly virtuous type, while the other has to be a dashing libertine rogue with a heart of gold. I’ll take that latter one if you don’t mind; I’m very good at roguishness. Mind you, I’m not entirely sure what a libertine is, or if I’ve ever been one. Are you a libertine? You possibly look like whatever one is if you don’t mind a draconequus saying so.”

“Mr Discord,” I started in tones that weren’t so much strangled as actively gargling hemp, “I’m, er, I’m mighty ... flattered by this, um, sudden interest. But my barn door don’t exactly swing… that is, you’re not my… I’m sure you’re… Mr Discord, I have questions!”

“Ah,” said Discord, tapping his cheek contemplatively with a claw. “Perhaps you’d like to know how I heard of you? Would that answer some of your questions, and also totally incidentally help win you over with my evident considerateness?”

“...potentially?” The churning somethingness was looking more of a safe haven by the minute.

“Righto! Well, it was very recently, just after Applejack, who I’m sure you’ve heard of, and her little sister and friends came back from your charming neck of the woods. Things had been unutterably dull in Ponyville for the few minutes before they’d returned, so naturally I sashayed over to extend my most sincere welcome-home greetings to Applejack and to ask her for all the juicy details of her trip. After we got through her traditional demands that I buzz off like the varmint I was and to stop casually uprooting her apple trees and flossing with them and all that tedium, she finally spilled a few details.” Discord’s eyes glittered like rubies hatching a scheme. “And they were juicy details indeed. You were mentioned. You sounded interesting.”

“I, er, glad to hear it.”

“Oh, but that wasn’t the end of it. My curiosity was piqued, so I found Applejack’s little sister and her friends. And in exchange for promising to turn their treehouse into a time machine, they told me everything I wanted to know.”

“I… wait, hang on, turn their treehouse into a what-now?”

“A time machine. Oh, don’t fuss. They’ll reappear three days ago and I’ll remind myself to go back and have told Rarity and Applejack then so that they’re sure to have taken all the necessary precautions and to not let them have interacted with themselves too much, the universe always gets such a headache when that happens. But never mind all that.You were what I was after.”

“Yeah, about that,” I said, scrabbling for that vital crux of the whole thing. “Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious? You’re another me!”

Nopony ever promised cruxes had to make sense. “I don’t follow,” I said, trying to shy backwards in the chair.

It were an ill-judged shying. The chair wobbled backwards in spite of its own tottering efforts to right itself, and I plummeted backwards in it. I scarcely had time to yelp and brace myself for concussive impact before Discord snapped his talons. I disappeared with a flash and a bang and reappeared cradled in his arms, no worse for wear. The chair clattered onto the floor, sprung to its legs, raced around behind one of the sofas, and hissed at me.

“That sort of thing!” enthused Discord, growing his third arm again to gesticulate where I’d nearly taken a tumble. “That sort of thing happening all the time! I’ve sauntered this way and that around this funny little world for multiple millennia now and I’ve met a few lovely beings in all that time, like Smoozey-Woozey and dear Fluttershy and maybe other ones I’ve forgotten about. But never another vortex of such chaos! It goes wherever you walk, you don’t even have to think for it to happen! You’re wonderful! You can turn the world topsy-turvy just like me! And you’re doing it all despite being just a pony who has to like or lump the laws of physics most of the time. How could I not fall in love?”

I boggled at him, which he took as a sign to elaborate while setting me down. “So, I sat down and did actual forethought, which felt exceedingly unnatural in the un-fun way and I look heartily forward to never repeating it, and I thought this should be conducted in proper pony style so as to not alarm you unduly. And luckily, I found plenty of reference material there!”

He proudly brandished the dog-eared book I’d seen earlier in his paw, and with all due trepidation mounting, I eyed the cover. Below the cursive title, a stallion and a mare on the middle of a ship deck were embracing in a manner scientifically designed to induce the vapours in all nearby scurvy onlookers. I tried to make out the title. “What the heck’s a seraglio?” I said nervously.

“No idea.” He flipped absently open to a random page, and even upside-down I could make out the word ‘throbbing’ appearing too many times for my continued good mental health. “ I skimmed all the boring bits. But there were lots of these to reference! Fluttershy keeps them in a closed box under her bed where anyone could get to them. And more beings ought to. They’re fascinating! So educational! Pony romance seems admirably consistent, no matter the setting.”

Now, if you’d told me that very morning, “Troubleshoes Clyde, your destiny is to become one half of a Fills-and-Brood plot with the unbridled and besotted Spirit of Chaos hisself, possibly in a manner involving seraglios,” I’d have given you a glass of water and a shady spot out of the sun to lie down in. And yet here I was, spending a long, prolonged, and yet more elongated moment staring that future right in its eye and wishing desperately for it to blink first. Really, it’s my own fault for waking up in the mornings. I oughtta know by now that leads to nothing good.

As I conducted all the mental shrieking that needed doing, Discord cleared his throat and produced a piece of paper, which unfolded down and out to reveal yet more bits of paper stapled on. “Now, my checklist did acquire a certain flowchart-ish quality when I was taking notes,” he said. “How would you like to start this? I gathered balls are a very popular candidate here, where we can do lots of mutual haughtiness whilst madly clamping down on our forbidden desires, or things to that effect. Ooh, do you have a current amour you currently chafe under? This would be an excellent time for me to scorn them and fan the flames of your surging passion and such.”

My mental shrieking was hoarsening to a plaintive whimper by this point, and he conjured a pencil for the sole purpose of scratching his ear with it while studying the list. “Actually, not to jump the gun here, but while I remember, could I ask if the future redeeming-me-of-my-myriad-vices you apparently do is at all negotiable? Only I’m not sure I’ve got any vices that need redeeming.”

Just my luck. It ain’t often some being’s at all keen on me, and when they’re as keen as can be, they’re the living incarnation of all things disharmonious.

“Mr Discord,” I said at last, mustering every lick of courage in my sorry self, “this ain’t going to work.”

He looked relieved. “Thank heavens,” he said. “Balls are dreadfully passé, aren’t they? This book’s example seems much more fun. If I was a dashing pirate who took you captive but was won over by your feisty—”

“No. I mean, I ain’t falling for you. Not like this, not no-how.”

Discord paused, and looked at me peevishly over the top of his paper. “Well, do you have a preferred starting point for your sultry romances, then? Come on, I’m a busy draconequus, I don’t have all eternity. Well, strictly speaking, I do, but that’s beside the poi—”

Pardon my Fancé, but if there’s anything that can really peeve a stallion off, it’s tangents in response to his clear denials. “Consarn it, I ain’t attracted to you! I ain’t romancin’ you!”

The peevishness intensified something fierce. “Hey, not fair, you’re skipping ahead in the process! I’ve put work into this orderly flowchart, you know, I went against my nature to whip it up! I’ve not even had the chance to look smoulderingly at you yet!”

“This ain’t part of your tom-fool flowcha—!” I breathed out heavily. “Look, let me me break it down for you. Firstly, I’m sorry, it ain’t nothing nopony decides, but you ain’t exactly my type.”

“Oh, peripheries,” Discord snorted. “I’m a formless and undying spirit of chaos, I can put every type on and off like party hats. That’s not even slightly a problem.”

“Secondly, I ain’t attracted to you!” Not entirely true, that. He had a certain sort of attractive quality to the eyes, even if it was the same as that of a forest fire or an open-heart surgery going wrong in the funniest ways. But there wasn’t no time to mind that.

“Look, that’s entirely fixable, if you’d just let me follow the flowchart—”

“No! Forget the flowchart! It ain’t based on anything real, it ain’t how romance works. All them stories are just … fairy-tales! Ponies don’t actually want what’s in them! Ponies … we mostly just want to find somepony similar, who’ll give and take and reciprocate alike with you, who’ll laugh and weep with you and keep you afloat when you’re low, and who you’ll do the same for, and who you’ll grow old and doddery with. That’s what we’re about! Small stuff! Not … not smoulderin’ and seragolios, whatever the heck they are!”

Discord looked stung. “Well, I… I don’t believe that for one minute. Why would ponies write about it if they didn’t really want it?”

“And thirdly, and this ain’t an insignificant thirdly, kidnapping me right out from my home was a undersaddles-on-head stupid way to make a first impression!”

He frowned, whipped out another book, the cover of which sported a strapping-looking mare holding a swooning stallion in her forehooves, flicked to a section near the start, and studied it fiercely before looking up at me again. “Well, I don’t believe that either. Look, this one sets a precedent!”

“Just take me home,” I muttered. “This ain’t working for anypony involved.”

“No! It has to!” he blurted out, panicked all of a sudden. “I… no, wait, this happens as well in the stories, doesn’t it? Playing hard to get or something like that. That’s what’s going on, isn’t it?”

“No. This is just me not being gotten at all. Take me back home. All you’re besotted by is a talent for rodeo-clownery.”

Discord fizzed with agitation, which is a verb I employ here with no metaphorical intent. “No,” he said. “No, no, no, this makes sense, if you’re chaotic like me, then of course you’ll come to the odd erroneous conclusion about how ponies actually do things. But I worked for this for once, it has to be right! I’m taking this to a higher authority!”

“...who on earth’s a higher authority on my own affairs of the heart than me?”

Discord shot a sharp smirk my way. “Who other than my best friend?”

And before I could follow that up with a request for clarification, he grabbed me around the midriff, snapped his claws, and once again, we were gone.

Chartreuse fizzled across my tongue, the sound of a harpsichord getting kicked down a flight of stairs played out before my eyes, and the smell of limes wiggled in through my ears to see what all the fuss was about. At that point, my brain helpfully turned inside-out, and then outside-in, and swithered between the two for the next moment before we flolloped back out into reality.

“Fluttershy!” called Discord. “I found my true love only he doesn’t think he’s my true love on account of not loving me back and he’s not following my flow-checklist-chart and he also doesn’t believe any of the dozens of books you keep under your bed are right and I need you to arbitrate, by which I mean tell him he’s all wrong! Fluuuuuttershy!”

It was a curious new room I found myself in, and it thankfully seemed a lot realer and more in accord in sensible natural laws, or any natural laws for that matter. It was shrouded in darkness, lit only by starlight spilling in through a window. Everything was small and compact and cosy, and a curiously musty but not unpleasant smell pervaded, as if hundreds of different animals had snuggled up on the carpet at one point or another but had all had the decency to their host to go to the toilet elsewhere. Speaking of the host, a bed at one end held a pegasus mare all wrapped up in blankets, and she stirred groggily as Discord hallooed into the hush. “Mrrgh? Discord?” she mumbled. “What’re—urgh—wha?”

A few fireflies dozing on a nearby shelf considerately lit up and flew around at that point, painting the room with soft golden light, and Fluttershy rose in her bed, wiping sleep-dust out of her eyes with one hoof and holding her blanket up against herself with the other. “Discord, what are you doing? It’s night-time. Mr Bear needs his sleep.”

“Mr Bear?” I enquired, stepping nervously back.

“Glaaaaargh,” complained the huge form of a bear that had hitherto been peaceably slumbering at my back, and my eyes whirled round to it the instant before my hoof came down on its stub of a tail. Discord hastily snapped his claws, and with a sensation like a full-body hiccup, I was teleported forward several inches, my hoof coming down mere inches from its tail.

I breathed out, trying not to contemplate my brush with mauling and failing miserably, while the bear gave me a look of sleepy suspicion. Beside it, a little white rabbit looked up from their basket and gave me the most concentrated look of bale I’ve ever seen on a critter. I very carefully stepped forward to give Mr Bear and the malevolent rabbit ample space.

“Miss Fluttershy, I’m Troubleshoes Clyde, and it’s a great pleasure to meet an Element-Bearer who ain’t trying to arrest me,” I said carefully and with all the courtesy a mare with a bear and a killer rabbit curled up in her bedroom deserved. “And I’m exceedingly sorry about being teleported into your room all uninvited like this, and I promise I’ll be out of your mane as soon as this ornery type’s had some sense talked into him.”

Fluttershy eyed the pair of us with great bewilderment but ever-decreasing sleepiness. Maybe making pals with a draconequus got rid of the need to drink caffeine ever again, not when a keen and unresting source of all things mad was keen to show you its latest atrocities at any time. “Oh, um. I think Applejack’s mentioned you. Nice to meet you. I, er.” Something seemed to be nagging at her mind, and eventually it got a claw-hold. “Discord, what did you mean, ‘my books’?”

“Oh, you know, those ones you keep under your bed with titles like ‘The Passion of Lady Hunter’ or ‘Shackled Stallions in the Solar Sera—’”

Full horrified wakefulness couldn’t have come any faster to Fluttershy if she’d been suddenly attacked by a coffee monster. “Discord, those were under my bed! Don’t go snooping under there! And … and I only read them for the plot!”

“Really? Well, I was reading them for inspiration. They’re educational. But Troubleshoes here says otherwise!”

Fluttershy gave us both a look that, although it wasn’t groggy anymore, radiated the desire to be so. “Perhaps you should both explain everything that’s going on to me,” she said wearily.

And so we did, though a few interventions on my and Fluttershy’s part to deter Discord from a few ‘artful redescriptions’ as he put them. At one point, Fluttershy asked to see the flow-checklist-chart, was proudly given it by Discord, and spent a moment scanning it while holding her head in her hooves. When Discord brought up my accursed luck as the source of his attraction, I confirmed that as indeed being a trait of mine, and Fluttershy looked stricken.

At the end of it all, Discord stood silent and expectant. Fluttershy didn’t speak for the longest time, and when she did, it was to softly say, “Discord, let him go home.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, said relief tempered by the sure-fire expectation of a suitably painful, embarrassing, and prolonged eruption of Discordian aggravation.

No such luck. I looked up, and Discord just looked like a puppy that’d had its bone swiped away from under its nose. “But I’m trying to court him,” he said with desperate hope.

“Yes. But it’s not working. Mr Troubleshoes clearly doesn’t feel the same way.”

“But… but he could! I did something orderly, Fluttershy! I don’t do that on a whim. I looked up all the books for how ponies like romance to be done, I researched—”

“The books? They’re not real, Discord. No more than the Thunderstorm legends, or the Dari...” She paused, thought, and rallied. “...or, um, some other series of adventure books. Just because some ponies get a thrill out of them doesn’t mean they’re what they want to have for themselves. They’re not a how-to guide. There’s no such thing for this.”

Discord was silent. And then, in tones that jangled with grievance, “I could have been properly chaotic this whole time?”

“Maybe you could. But I don’t think it would have helped. There’s nothing wrong with trying to put your best foot … or, um, claw or tentacle or whatever you like forward, and I’m sure you tried your best, for whatever you thought was best. But you have to respect Troubleshoes if he’s not keen. And honestly, Discord, I think you’ve ruined things.”

A silence deeper than ocean trenches. “Ruined things?” he said meekly. Fluttershy nodded.

And then... “You’re doing that ‘cruel to be kind’ thing, I recognise it,” Discord said, his voice small.

“I’m not—”

“And you wouldn’t do that unless you knew it was the right thing to do. You don’t mess around with kindness like that. Not you.” His voice was still small.

Stars preserve me, I was watching a little yellow pegasus school an ancient demon of chaos in how to handle unrequited affection with grace. I’d try to peg where my life went wrong, but there ain’t a date early enough.

But say anything for old Troubleshoes, say he’s a softheart whenever it’s least convenient for himself. And looking at that big lanky serpent-chimera-thing and the confused disappointment in his eyes, I did wonder how regular a sensation all that was for him. Falling in love… and achieving nothing, for that matter. And how lonely he might be if it weren’t regular.

And softheart that I am, I did remember that teleport he pulled to save me from a bear-induced mauling. He’d picked me up from my assorted plights, even if he’d been the one to plant me squarely in them. And there was that checklist-cum-flowchart, the creation of which had come as naturally to him as algebra to a duck. There’d been something in him trying.

I’ve always had sympathy for the triers.

And, well… if I’m being at all honest…

I’ve always had lots of sympathy for them as can teleport me out of unforeseen maulings. It ain’t a type of sympathy I dole out that often, or was aware I had then till five minutes ago, but it still qualifies, dangit.

“Ah, Discord...” I ventured, just as the draconequus seemed like he was trying to steel himself back into brainless joviality. “I shan’t lie to you, it’s been… terrifying in places. And you did come on something fierce.”

“In my defence, it’s an approach that doesn’t let me down that often,” he said, a shade too affectedly-carelessly.

“But what with what I’ve been given, I reckon I’d be a pretty poor sort of stallion if I didn’t give second chances to folks who mess up a little. Howsabout you make a proper introduction, and never mind that checklist none?”

Gloom slithered right off him from horn-tip to tail-end, and his eyes lit up with hope. Behind him, Fluttershy looked on in utter bewilderment.

“But… but I just gave him the respecting-boundaries lesson,” she said plaintively. “I thought that should have resolved it.”

“It was a mighty fine lesson to impart, Miss Fluttershy,” I replied. “And heck, I reckon there’s room to build on it. Room to rise up yet.”

And before she and I could say a word more, Discord whipped out the checklist like a conjurer whipping out cards. “Can we keep the affectionate pet-names from here, at least?” he said keenly. “They were the fun part!”

And that, for a given definition of ‘that’ meaning ‘only where it started’, was that.

So ...there you have it. That’s where ‘My lovey dovey darlingest’ originates. He’s got the subtlety of a brick, I swear. But for a hide that undergoes less unexpected slapstick whenever he’s around, and for his delighted laughter (occasionally interspersed with screams from the audience when his disguises come off) whenever I’m rodeo-clowning, I’ll endure subtlety the size of a mountain. The size of me, even.

It ain’t no fairy-tale. It’s a bit of give, a bit of take, and a lot of cursin’ whenever he contrives to drive me up the wall with something or other. He’s got a rare talent for that. But he’s still a trier, and it ain’t every stallion who’s got a draconequus at their back.

Not just my luck, for once. And thank the stars for that, I say.