Taken

I feel grass underneath me when I get my senses back around me. My front yard, I remember, is where I was taken by the beings that turned out to be Princess Luna and her cadre. I groan as I sit up; even though I did pretty much nothing to contribute to coming back from Equestria, my body feels like it’s been vampirized. Weak and listless, in other words.

I look around me as I think about everything that’s just happened to me. I was just in Equestria… Granted, all I saw of it was the single room that Luna practically kept me in, but still… Me, in Equestria. Just from what Twilight’s told me about it, it seems like an amazing place.

I’m making it my goal now to get back to Equestria, and to experience it the way that I should. A proper experience. Until then, though, and speaking of Twilight… I probably need to get back to her.

As I stand up and stretch my limbs, I notice that something feels… different. It’s almost like there’s a palpable tension in the air. Something isn’t right. I walk as fast as I can to the front door and open it up.

Immediately, I see one reason why things don’t feel right: the house is trashed. It looks like someone came through there with a fury, maybe looking for something. There’s no signs of blood or anything, so I rule out the possibility of a fight having taken place there.

Either that, or someone took the time to clean up. I try to push that thought out of my mind, though; I don’t want to think about Twilight getting hurt again.

I hear voices now. They’re coming from out back, so I make my way out to the back door. When I hear who the two voices belong to, though, I stop. Oh crap. This isn’t good…

“I don’t need to be listening to this,” Twilight is saying. “I know what he is. He’s a good person; he’d never do anything to hurt me. He saved me, for Celestia’s sake!”

“Are you sure?” the other voice replies, which I can pretty much immediately identify as belonging to Discord. “Do you really believe you know him that well?”

“I’d like to think I do,” Twilight replies, no hint of hesitation in her voice. She really does believe what she’s saying, I realize. She feels more for me than I realized… “He hasn’t given me a reason to doubt what I feel for him.”

“Oh?” Discord asks. “And what would that be, specifically? You have piqued my curiosity, young pony…”

I sneak a glance at Twilight’s face. Oh shit. She’s feeling the same things that I once did: that she can’t help but tell him the truth, even though it may end up being detrimental to her. Why does Discord have to have that way with his victims?

Twilight is silent for a moment, which is encouraging; maybe she is resisting Discord’s sway. After another moment, though, my heart sinks when she speaks again: “It’s… complicated.”

“Well yes, I suppose that would be a good way to put it.” Shit. Discord knows more than he’s letting on. He’s just questioning Twilight to see if she’ll admit to… whatever it is he’s trying to get her to admit to.

She picks up on this too, I see. “You already know the answer, don’t you…? So why ask me?”

Discord, I see, grins. “I want to hear it from your own lips. I want you to admit it to me, seeing as you’ll never admit it to anyone else. And also, I want him to hear it for himself.” He gestures to the house. “And by the way, Matthew, it’s not nice to listen in on a conversation and not let us know you’re there…”

He knows I’m here, I guess. I hear Twilight call out, “Is that true? Are you there?” Damn it all. I was just going to pretend that I didn’t hear him, or that I wasn’t here at all, but now… there’s no way that’s going to happen.

I open the door and step outside, closing it behind me. “Fuck you,” I say to Discord. “You’ve been nothing but trouble this whole time. Why are you here, anyways?”

Discord sighs. “See, that’s your problem. You hear, but you do not listen. And yes, there is a difference between those two. I have already told you the basics of my purpose for being here. It is to test you, and to show you uncomfortable things about yourselves. You will need to know, and to overcome, these things before you die.”

“But that’s not all, is it?” Twilight asks him. “You haven’t told us what you want us to learn.”

Discord grins again. “Oh, and take all the fun out of the game? Sorry, but that doesn’t seem likely to happen.” He turns to me. “So, my new friend… Where have you been? You almost missed the party.”

I look at Twilight, who has a fearful look in her eyes. Back to Discord now. “I’m not hurt, Twilight. You don’t need to worry about that. I was safe in the hands of your Princess.”

Discord’s grin fades. “You… were where?”

It’s my turn to gloat to him. “Oh, so you’re not omniscient? And here I thought that’s what you were trying to make me believe… Though I am telling the truth.” I turn to Twilight. “Princess Luna sends her regards, as does Rainbow Dash. They all can’t wait for you to come home.”

Twilight is reeling from this new revelation. “You… talked to Princess Luna? How?”

“She took me to Equestria. I spoke to her there, along with a few other ponies. Lyra and Vinyl, I think she said their names were.”

Discord butts back in: “There’s no way you could have gone to Equestria, human liar. No human has ever gone to our world, and for good reason: no one wants them there!”

Twilight bucks up to him. “You have no right to say that! We do not hate. As long as he did no harm to us, we would allow him to do what he wanted, and you know it.”

Discord looks at her with pity. “That’s what you’d like to think, and by all means keep thinking that. Unfortunately, that’s just not to be… I know more than you think about this individual. I know what he’s capable of, and I know that he doesn’t even know that. And once everyone finds out what I know… no one will want him. Just like no one has wanted him up until now.”

Twilight grits her teeth and steps up a bit. “Don’t… say… those things about him. There is someone who wants him…” Her horn flashes pink. “And she’s standing right here!”

I feel a rush of warmth through my body, and I can’t help but smile. I’d suspected as much, but I never thought I’d hear her say that she cared about me. I look at Discord, still smiling. “See? I do have somepony on my side. And no matter what, they’ll stick with me. Unlike you, who has no one.”

Discord is looking pretty pissed at me. He holds his hand up and conjures up a ball of what appears to be cotton candy. I’m about to laugh and make a comment along the lines of “Is that the best you got,” when he launches it at me.

When it hits my chest, I’m knocked off my feet and hit the ground hard. Dammit, that hurt! My chest is on fire right now; it feels like I may have broken a few ribs. I should have known better than to underestimate Discord and his magic. Harmless, my ass…

I stand up to see Twilight sling a bolt of magic at Discord. It hits him and causes him to go backwards about a foot or so, but he recovers quickly. “Come at me, Twilight!” he says with a grin. “All this could belong to you! Just reach out and take it!”

With this, Discord and Twilight start staring each other down. I’m about to ask them if they can’t just get along, when Discord makes the first move and conjures a dark storm cloud above Twilight’s head. Immediately, it starts to rain, drenching her from head to… hoof? I guess that would be the proper terminology, seeing as ponies don’t have toes, technically…

And wait. Why is Discord just making it rain on her? I guess just to aggravate her. He is a trickster, from what I’ve been told.

Twilight is getting tired of this, I see as well. She shoots a bolt of magic at him, but he dodges it, still smiling. He’s playing around with her.

“I’m not leaving until you admit it, Twilight,” Discord says with his usual grin. “Not until you say what’s truly on your heart. Or are you too much of a scaredy-pony to tell him how you truly feel?”

How… she truly feels? That makes no sense. I look at Twilight and see that she’s ready for all of this to be over with. So, I resolve to help her any way that I can. I close my eyes again, and concentrate. When I open them a few seconds later, there it is. The Flame.

I wonder what else I can do with it. I imagine it taking the form of a baseball bat, with spikes driven into it. Before my eyes, it happens! Wow. I can’t help but grin as I turn to Discord. “Hey! Over here!”

Discord turns to me, about to say something, when he sees the Flame weapon in my hand and stops before he even gets out the first word. I just grin and run at him. I’m not high enough to hit him in the head, but I do score a solid body shot.

Discord howls in pain as he flies up to avoid my new-found weapon. So the Flame can be used for offensive purposes. That’s good to know. As he flies up, Twilight shoots another bolt of magical energy at him, causing him to have to duck it, which put him once again in range of my basher.

This goes on for about another ten or fifteen seconds, before Discord finally howls in rage and lets out a wave of magical energy, knocking us both flat on our asses. He then disappears in a flash of blinding light, but not before yelling out, “You think you’ve won this one…? No. You’ve just lost more than you’ll ever believe possible!”

When the light cleared, Twilight and I looked at each other. “I didn’t think you had it in you,” I say.

She tilts her head. “You didn’t think that I had what in me?”

“The ability to fight,” I reply. “Well, it’s more along the lines of the will to fight. You seem so docile and peaceful, for the most part…”

“I don’t like to fight,” she says. “Nopony does. When it comes down to it, though, those who can fight do so, no matter what their personal views on the subject may be.” She sighs. “Let’s just go inside. I want you to tell me everything that happened after you disappeared.”

I nod and open the door, letting Twilight go in before me. When I have the door shut, I turn to her. “Are you hungry?”

She nods. “When I use up magic like that, it not only depletes my magical reserves, it also drains off a little bit of my physical energy as well.” Ah. That’s good to know. So she’s not just this limitless fount of magical energies. She’s a little bit… human.

I make my way into the kitchen. “What do you want to eat?” I ask.

“If you want, you could make some of that spaghetti. I never tried to make it while you were gone. I figured you could make it a lot better than I could.”

I laugh. “You got it. In fact, I’ll cook up some of the ground turkey that we’ve got in the freezer. It’s really good, I promise,” I say quickly, upon seeing her skeptical expression. “Or do ponies not eat meat?”

“We’re not really meat-eaters,” Twilight says slowly.

“That’s cool. I’ll just cook it up for myself, then.” I go to the kitchen and turn on the stove, starting to get all of the pans and everything ready for cooking. While I’m doing this, I ask her, “So what went down here while I was gone?”

“It was utterly boring,” she replied. “It was just me here by myself, wondering incessantly where you’d gone off to… I thought one of those creatures had gotten ahold of you…”

So she had been worried about me… “No, nothing like that. I was summoned by Princess Luna to Celestia. She wanted to-“

“So she called you there? And not me?” There was a hint of sadness in her voice.

I put the pasta into the now-boiling water. “It wasn’t on purpose. She meant to lock on to you, but she got me instead. Tell you what. Let’s talk about something different until we get the food done, and then once we’re situated at the table we can talk about what happened to me.”

Twilight nods, and we spent the next few minutes chatting about her life in Equestria, and a little bit about what my life was like in my world. The conversation wiles away the minutes, and soon everything is ready for dinner. I put everything onto the plates- just the spaghetti for her, the spaghetti and the cooked turkey for me- and set them onto the table.

Just then, I realize that I’m nicking pretty badly, so I motion to Twilight that I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette. She hops up and follows me outside; I figure it’s because she wants to know pretty badly, just what happened during my time in Equestria.

Sure enough, as soon as we get outside and I light up my cigarette, Twilight looks at me. “Okay, so: tell me everything.”

I begin to recount everything that I could recall: meeting Princess Luna and her cadre, finding out about the Changeling attack that damaged the machines, and finally being sent back to this world. I remember the necklace, and I hand it over to her. “Princess Luna said that that necklace has some sort of spell cast on it, so that you can stay in contact with herself and Celestia at all times.”

She looks like she’s about to cry. “This… I wasn’t expecting at all.” She looks at me. “Did they give you anything similar?”

I shook my head. “I’m a human, obviously; I’m not a pony, much less a pony who means as much to them all as you. Especially the one who looks like she got pushed through a tie-dye machine when she was young- Rainbow Dash, I think her name was.”

Twilight looks at me with an interesting expression on her face. “Why do you single Rainbow Dash out?”

“She was giving me some vibes that… well, that she felt more for you than just friendship.”

She looked confused. “Like what, she’s in love with me? That’s… highly unlikely. Not to mention highly illogical.” I take another puff and flick the ashes down onto the ground. “I’ve known Rainbow Dash longer than anypony else, well except for Fluttershy, and-“

This is new. “Who’s Fluttershy?” It’s only after I ask, that I remember that she’d mentioned that name in one of her comatose mutterings.

“She’s one of my best friends,” Twilight confesses. “She’s basically Ponyville’s veterinarian. She has a way with animals that nopony else that I’ve seen even comes close to…”

I smile. “She seems nice.”

Twilight laughs. “Oh, you have no idea. She’s the most loving pony I’ve ever met. She is very… timid, though. Nopony has a problem with that, really, though sometimes it causes… issues for us. Like when we had to get rid of that dragon that was threatening to run us all out of Ponyville with its smog-“

Wait. What? “A… dragon?”

She looks at me funny again. “Yeah. They’re somewhat common in our world. In fact, my assistant back in Ponyville is a young dragon named Spike. He’s also the unofficial mail-dragon, when it comes to my correspondences between myself and Princess Celestia.”

I stamp out my cigarette butt and light another one. “So, is Celestia like your teacher or something?”

Twilight nods. “She’s been that way since I was a filly. She’s taught me so much… She’s been more of a parent to me, in some ways, than my own parents have.”

I can relate to that, and I tell her as much. For the next few minutes, we just talk about ourselves, content to make small talk. When I’m done with my cigarette, I stamp it out and we go back inside. Upon sitting at the dinner table, we dig in.

Twilight looks like she’s died and gone to heaven, and that’s just from the first bite. “This… this is delicious. Where on earth did you learn to cook like this?”

I shrug. “Necessity, I guess. Spaghetti is cheap where I come from, and inexpensive foods are the best kind when you’re on a hella tight budget. So, I learned how to make spaghetti really well.” I dig in a bit more. “Though I will admit, I’m normally not as adept at making grilled meat, especially not from memory… Heh maybe I should start calling myself Jace.”

I can tell she doesn’t get it, but she doesn’t say anything. After we get finished, I do up the dishes and then go sit down on the couch. Twilight jumps up and curls up in my lap, closing her eyes contentedly. That reminds me of something.

“Hey, Twilight,” I say a bit cautiously, not wanting to offend her in any way, “there’s something I’ve had on my mind since earlier today.”

She looks up at me curiously. “Oh, and what’s that?”

I brace myself and speak what’s on my mind: “Was Discord right?” Her expression is one of confusion, so I decide to throw caution to the wind and just ask her.

“Twilight… Are you in love with me?”