“All I’m trying to do,” Discord said tersely, seizing the tiny white rabbit with the talons of his eagle claw and shooting him a dirty look, “is catch forty winks. Is that really so much to ask for?”
He’d hoped – or rather, Fluttershy had hoped – that time and proximity would allow him and Angel Bunny to put aside their differences; or rather, put aside their massive similarities (to say nothing of their egos). No matter how hard Discord tried to nap on his hammock suspended above his lake of chocolate milk, though, the cantankerous rabbit would find some excuse to skewer him with razor-sharp carrot shards, or kick at his dangling legs, or gnaw on his fluttering tail fluff.
The temptation to snap his fingers and watch Angel disappear into the ether was almost too much to resist and it brought a wide smile to the draconequus’ confused agglomeration of features, but resist it he did. Fluttershy would be back soon, and the rabbit would soon go back to being her problem. If nothing else, he would earn himself some brownie points by not sending Angel Bunny tumbling into the void for all eternity.
And maybe – just maybe – turning Fluttershy’s cottage into a swamp of cocoa the likes of which would give even Pinkie Pie pause gave him the moral high ground. This time, anyway. Tossing the petulant rabbit, who was still kicking out as best he could, aside, Discord went back to lazing, letting out a soft sigh as he did so. Sure, the cottage was nice, but it was also a bit … drab. It needed that slight touch of whimsy, a gentle brush of chaos, to make it truly feel like a home.
It was not his habit to hang around the her home when Fluttershy was out and about on her errands – rescuing critters, zapping monsters with rainbow lasers, all that humdrum stuff that kept them apart – but she’d wanted him and Angel to be friends, or at least not kicking lumps out of each other, and so here he was. The other animals would run a mile whenever he was visiting, but the rabbit was made of sterner stuff; he was happy to soak up whatever Discord could mete out, and would respond in kind with improvised projectiles and the like.
Discord almost respected him as a worthy adversary.
Boredom was the enemy of momentum, though; with the agreement that a stony fate awaited the slightest misuse of his chaos powers, his life had become almost staid. Trolling the miserable peasants of Ponyville was all well and good, but it lacked the joie de vivre of turning Equestria into his own personal playground. There were days, he knew, when he was hanging on by the merest of threads and the prospect of returning to his own personal Tartarus seemed almost worth it just to see the landscape riddled with anarchy one last time.
He made a noise in the back of his throat. Of course, what would poor Fluttershy do without me? I couldn’t leave her all alone, with only those five ridiculous Elements of Harmony and that wearisome lagomorph for company, now could I? Some friend I’d be if I left her to such a tortuous future.
If the rest of the pantheon – Tirek, Hydia, Gaea, and their ilk – were to find out about his domestication by a small yellow equine, they’d laugh in his face. Better not let them ever find out, then.
Thank the Creator that they were all safely ensconced in Tartarus. Or worse.
Eyes closed, seconds from drifting off back to sleep, Discord was startled by the front door nearly flying off of its hinges. “They made me do it!” he said, only half-awake, almost falling into the – he couldn’t help noting – quickly draining chocolate river below and getting himself tangled up in the hammock. A little voice in the back of his mind said, “No way that was Fluttershy. No matter how cross she is, she never, ever abuses the furniture.”
Unfurling himself and zapping the remaining milk back from whence it came, Discord stood upright and regarded the figure loitering in the shadowy, half-lit hallway. Was it that late already? It certainly had a familiar, Fluttershy-esque shape to it, but there was something … off about it. The aura wasn’t quite right: angry and spiky, rather than gentle and placid.
Angel Bunny curiously approached the ill-defined presence; he was about halfway to it when his eyes widened in alarm and he darted back, a blur of white, rather sweetly taking refuge behind one of Discord’s legs. “Oh, now we’re besties, are we?” he asked sardonically of the shivering rabbit. “Fluttershy?” he said addressing the … whatever or whoever it was. “Is that you?”
The timid pegasus was usually the very definition of well-kempt: with a natural beauty that none of Rarity’s pills or potions could match, she was – from a purely objective, purely aesthetic viewpoint – perfection itself. Now, though, her mane was a tangled mess of wild peaks and troughs, like a waveform that had no truck with the notion of collapsibility; her bright blue eyes had taken on a reddish tint, lending her a piercing gaze; he couldn’t help noticing that her wings had become long and leathery, picking up some sharp edges along the way, too. Almost as afterthought, he spotted her lateral incisors peaking out of her muzzle.
She could’ve been an intimidating, fearsome presence, but for the fact that it was, well, Fluttershy. And she was crying.
“What happened?” asked Discord, approaching her slowly so as not to startle her into a fight-or-flight response in her obviously anxious state.
“I’m a monster,” was her reply, choked out between sobs.
“You are not.” He recalled how Princess-Know-Nothin’-Know-It-All had accidentally transferred a curse to Fluttershy some months earlier whilst trying to eradicate an infestation of fruit bats at Applejack’s orchard. Evidently, she wasn’t totally successful in curing it. As he approached, he could see now that her body was covered in scratches. They were healing at a phenomenal rate, however, and would likely be gone in a matter of minutes. “Fluttershy?” he asked tenderly.
“I was on my way back from tending the manticore cubs in the Everfree Forest when I, er, changed,” she said, wiping her nose with a hoof. “A few ponies spotted me emerging from the woods and they, uh, they thought that I was some kind of-” she made a choking noise in the back of her throat and swallowed painfully “-some kind of hideous beast. They’re not wrong, are they?” She looked up at Discord, her blazing red eyes every bit as inquisitive, as searching, as her blue ones.
Discord felt his heart – up until now, he hadn’t been certain that he actually possessed one – hammering away in his chest; the very thought of somepony attacking his dear, sweet Fluttershy caused feelings that he couldn’t name to take root within his stomach. He wanted to lash out with all of his powers at those who had done this, but at the same time … other feelings told him to tend to his friend. The latter instinct, much to Ponyville’s unknowing relief, finally won out in the end and he wrapped his arms gently around Fluttershy’s neck and pulled her close to him. “You aren’t a monster. You’re a victim of a spell gone wrong. Happens to the best of us.” He smiled forlornly.
Fluttershy didn’t give herself up to the draconequus’ embrace, but nor did she try to break free of it either. Her look suggested that she wanted to be on the other side of Equestria – or beyond its borders entirely – to get away from whatever it was that had happened to her. “D’you, um, know how to reverse this transformation?”
Studying her for a moment, Discord finally shook his head. “Pony and draconequus magic are a bit different. You’ll need to have Twilight, or the Royal Sisters, take another look at you, I’m afraid.”
“You don’t think I could accidentally hurt anypony while like this, do you?” she asked, fear making her voice tremble.
“Not unless they’re an apple.”
“Be serious.”
“I was.” Discord smirked. “It’s not in your nature to hurt anypony or anything, Fluttershy. The only thing that’s remotely monstrous about you is how much you care. Whether the thing in question deserves it or not,” he added with mild reproof.
“You deserve somepony to love you, too, Discord.”
“I was talking about Angel, but thank you.”
She swiped at him playfully with a hoof, finally allowing herself to succumb to his tender hug. “As far as big, dumb animals go, you’re not so bad,” she said.
“Big? Dumb?” replied Discord with a tone of mock hurt. “Don’t you mean devilishly handsome? Rakishly intelligent? Smouldering intensity?” At that last, he stuck his lips out in a pout and narrow his eyes as if he were posing for one of Photo Finish’s magazines. He’d read somewhere that, if you couldn’t solve somepony’s problems, the best thing to do was distract them from whatever it was that was bothering them. And what better way to distract someone than by talking about how awesome you were?
Rolling her eyes, Fluttershy said, “Okay, you’re kinda cute, happy?” She immediately felt herself flush at having spoken those words.
Discord, too, found himself rather taken aback at the admission; if Fluttershy had ever found herself attracted to anypony, she certainly never made a big song and dance about it thanks to her timid nature. Maybe this bat-curse isn’t such a bad thing, after all. “There’s something that I should probably tell you, too.”
“What’s that?” asked Fluttershy.
“I think you’re kinda cute, too. You know, for an equine.”
Unable to tell whether Discord was pranking her or not, Fluttershy merely settled for raising her eyebrows. “Uh, thanks? I think.”
“Okay, I phrased that really badly, didn’t I?” said Discord, holding his hands up by way of an apology. “It’s just that, ever since we became friends, you’ve held a very special place in the heart that, until just now, I didn’t know that I had. Before you, I had no idea about friendship, kindness, empathy and all that stuff that makes you feel a bit icky when you’re trying to cause some good old-fashioned wholesome chaos.” He looked down at the floor, noticing his mismatched feet shuffling of their own accord. “The truth is, I may feel something slightly more than friendship toward you, but I have literally no idea how to go about expressing it beyond being a topsy-turvy-” he demonstrated this by divorcing his head from his neck and allowing it to spin like a top “-nuisance in the hopes that you’ll notice.”
A protracted moment of silence descended upon them and Discord, head firmly in place once more, shut his eyes, fearing the worst. I’ve just made a colossal fool of myself in front of the one pony who could sort of stand my company. I really am a freakin’ idiot. When he opened them again, he saw Fluttershy’s moist eyes gazing at him; from the way her lips were quirked, he guessed that … she wanted him to make a move. Acting on instincts that, along with his heart, he didn’t know that he had, Discord placed his own lips against Fluttershy’s muzzle.
Apples and lavender was the curious, yet intoxicating, scent that filled his nostrils. It was nothing more than an undramatic peck; soft an innocent, chaste and gentle, but there was just enough of an undercurrent to suggest more. Still waters ran deep, so they said, and that seemed to be the case with Fluttershy, too. The promise that, under the surface, there were more treasures to be found than could be gleaned from above.
“This-” Fluttershy gestured to her current condition when they broke contact “-doesn’t bother you, does it?”
Discord shook his head. Speaking sincerely, he said, “What’s on the outside doesn’t matter because-” his clawed hand rested on Fluttershy’s chest and he felt her heartbeat, and she covered his talons with her own hoof “- I’m realising that what’s in here matters far more. Having been a monster for so long, I can categorically state: you are nothing like me.”
“Thank you,” replied Fluttershy haltingly. Unsure as to what else she could say, she settled for simply kissing his cheek softly.
“Now,” Discord said mischievously, “before we go to Princess Wingspan’s, how would you like to go for a swim in my chocolate river?”
