Princess Celestia sat on her throne and let the letter slip from her magical grasp to glide to the floor as she lowered her head in a moment of silence.

“I can still tell when you are thinking of me, Celestia.” Discord’s voice eerily filled the room as he materialized out of thin air in front of the princess wearing a pair of reading glasses as he peered over a copy of Pinocchio. Discord leaned in close, a grin plastered on his face. “I believe you have something to tell me.”

Celestia looked angrily at him, but remained silent.

The plaster shattered as Discord spat the pieces in Celestia’s direction, “Why do you look at me like that? You wanted to save them from their own extinction didn’t you? And I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

Celestia remained silent, the view to the galaxies far off in her mane waved as if blown by solar winds.

“ANSWER ME CELESTIA!” All of the stained glass windows of her castle exploded outward as Discord bellowed loud enough to deafen any mortal pony as well as bend the back of the throne upon which Celestia sat backwards ninety degrees. “Oopsie.” Discord snapped his fingers and all of the damage was undone.

Princess Celestia took a slow breath and started to speak quietly, “Do you really call your tricking ignorant humans and enslaving them as donkeys a way of helping them?”

“Absolutely not,” Discord flew through the air like a flying snake raising his tone as he continued to speak, “I call it a a way of helping you. You, Celestia, you, who wished to save an alien race from their own self-made demise.”

“I was just helping you with one little problem,” Discord whipped his body around a tiny stage that wasn’t there before and puppetted a marionette of Celestia walking across the stage filled with cutouts of sad sickly humans surrounded by dead plants and trees. As the puppet Celestia moved past human cutouts they turned around revealing smiling ponies and healthy foliage on the opposite side. Then another set of human puppets holding guns marched across the stage and the ponies were knocked down, “You tried to make them able to live on their own planet, but others rejected your gift, even took this gift away from the humans you had already helped by simply killing them.”

Discord threw his uncountable number of hands up into a shrug throwing all of the puppets he was holding behind his back in the process, “How terrible for you that there were humans so insistent on dying that they would take the whole planet with them.”

When Celestia remained silent, Discord made the stage disappear and propped his head onto his clawed hand and looked at the princess, “I’m sorry, does your silence suggest I haven’t done a good enough job of stopping the humans who would have killed not only your precious ponies but their own kind for becoming them? Aren’t you the least bit amused by the comedy of their hubris?” Discord stepped to the side and held up his hands showcasing a neon flashing sign with an arrow that read ‘Be a jackass, right this way!’ “I could have put this on the door, and they still would have come inside!”

Again Celestia remained silent. “Why can’t you just say it, Celestia? Why can’t you just say,” Discord transformed the top of his head to match Celestia’s perfectly with the addition of two red curled horns, a human affectation, “Thank you Discord for keeping the humans from killing one another.” Discord broke the illusion and stared into Celestia’s eyes from mere millimeters away.

For a time the only movement in the room was Celestia’s mane. “You know what the best part of all of this is? Facing the same cruelty as a donkey that they gave freely as a human has taught them more in a week about compassion than you have managed to teach whole races in lifetimes.”

Celestia’s expression cracked showing a flash of sorrow, a fraction of guilt, and even a dash of defeat as Discord flew back grinning, “Ah! There’s the thanks I was looking for!”

Celestia really looked at Discord, perhaps for the first time that day if not that century, “It hurts me to admit that you are helping, Discord, in your own evil way, you are protecting the innocent, but surely you know that you’ll quickly run out of new victims. With human souls under my protection you won’t even be able to breed new donkeys. The nation state you have created will die out in less than a generation, so what do you hope to win in all of this?”

Discord glared back at Celestia, the first truly malevolent look he had given all day, “I don’t hope to win anything, Celestia; I just want to leave scars.” With that Discord disappeared to the snap of his fingers that lingered and echoed deep into the castle.

Author's Note

This story was inspired by the Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire, Pinocchio, and an unfortunate number of people I have had the displeasure of meeting.

I wrote this story seat-of-the-pants style which I have never done before, and only managed to figure out a title that wouldn't give everything away after I was finished. I had entirely too much fun writing the "too obvious to be obvious" references in this story.

Roll Credits Music:

Note: The single version of this song uses an alternative line for the first refrain of "If you love me let me go" which is "If you love me let me die".