A Marriage of Inconvenience
A Marriage of Inconvenience
Slouching, Discord looked into the mirror. The gold-inlaid marble walls of the palace suite around him showed up the same in the reflection, but the image of himself that he saw there, instead of wearing the orange tuxedo he had on, was dressed in a white taffeta wedding gown with an interlocking daisy headband holding some sort of veil that draped down the back of his head.
"What do you think?" the him in the mirror asked.
With a sigh, he glanced at himself standing on the carpet beside him. "I think you both ought to know that this is making me very uncomfortable."
"Of course." The him in the mirror nodded. "We wouldn't have it any other way."
"Indeed." The him on the carpet grabbed a pawful of spaghetti out of the air. "Because if you're not uncomfortable, then no creature will be uncomfortable! And we couldn't have that, now, could we?" He straightened the spaghetti strands between his lion claws and his eagle talons, and the left sleeve of Discord's tuxedo jacket shriveled till it barely covered his elbow. "Perfect!" the other him shouted.
"I'll say it is!" The him in the mirror grabbed one of his own puffy sleeves and tore it off. "After all, when the Lord of Chaos gets married, the entire world should be uncomfortable!"
Glaring, Discord snapped his claws, and the two tiresome Discords disappeared. "Well, this isn't helping at all!" he declared, staring at the empty mirror. Raising his voice, he called, "Can somepony take this mirror away? It seems to have slipped a cog."
"Discord?" a familiar voice asked, and Discord swiveled around to see Twilight step tall and stately through the suite's doorway. Her mane billowed as usual in the non-existent breeze, and her white taffeta gown clung to and draped from various parts of her in a manner altogether too tasteful.
As tempted as he was to hop over and lick it to test how tasteful it was, he decided he would rather be horrified. "Twilight!" He reached up and wrenched both his eyes from their sockets, pressing them against his chest to shield them. "You know it's bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the ceremony!"
"Uh-huh." The hem of her gown made the most intriguing swish-swish sound across the carpet, and the slightly growing volume of her words affirmed that she was indeed coming closer. "We kind of need to talk about that, don't you think?"
"Hmmph!" Letting his eyeballs float upward like little yellow balloons, he folded his arms and spun away from her. "I can't imagine what you mean!" He slammed his head over sideways to impale his eyes on the tips of his horns, then straightened so they could slither down into place again. "We're as happy as a soon-to-be husband and wife can be!" He glanced at her. "Aren't we?"
"You tell me." She stopped, her face not adorned with the wide-eyed confusion he was used to seeing there. Instead, she looked almost as tired as he felt himself. "And I mean that literally. Tell me why you've transformed all of Canterlot into one giant wedding chapel, why you've locked me into this admittedly lovely gown, and why you've brought the entire governing structure of Equestria to a halt while insisting that you and I are scheduled to get married."
"Because...I love you?" He tried to state it definitively, but the things squirming around his innards wouldn't let him.
Twilight gave about half a smile. "We both know that's not true."
"Well?" Leaping away, he shot his arms off like miniature rockets, zooming around the room amid gouts of cherry-scented blue smoke. "What choice have we got? We're the only two left!"
"Only two?" Her forehead creased in something close to the proper sort of confusion, but Discord found he wasn't getting any pleasure at all from the sight. "Discord, I don't—"
"I'll explain, then!" Almost having to spit that horrible word out, he sucked his arms back into place and held up four digits on his lion paw, two digits on his eagle claw. "There are exactly six immortal beings in this entire world, Twilight Sparkle! Two of them are sisters, two of them are mother and daughter, and then there's you and me! We need some sort of intimate relationship, or the whole thing will... It'll... There won't be any...any..." The room whirled, and he found that he couldn't quite remember how to form words.
"Ah." Twilight had somehow sidled right up next to him, was reaching out a hoof and resting it on his shoulder, and Discord suddenly realized that he'd collapsed into a boneless heap on the floor. "I miss her, too," she said softly.
Whatever internal consistency he'd been clinging to melted, and Discord couldn't stop himself from becoming nothing more than a fetlock-deep puddle of goo covering the entire floor of the suite.
"But marriage isn't the answer," Twilight was going on. "We're friends, Discord, and we always will be. Maybe that'll change to something else someday, but right now, talking to each other as friends is the thing that'll help us both the most."
Not even sure where his mouth was at this point, Discord let a couple bubbles form in his current morass. "Help?" one bubble squeaked when it popped, and the second gave off a gassy, "How?"
"By remembering the good times of the past, gathering with the friends we still have in the present, and vowing that we'll make her proud as we head into the future." Twilight's legs moved, and he felt her settle down into her stomach, the sodden mess of him sloshing against her gown. "It won't be easy." She'd gotten even quieter. "But we can do it together. Just not as husband and wife..."
Parts of him were shrieking that he needed to scoop her up, needed to merge with her, needed to do whatever it took to hold onto her—onto something!—and not to make the same mistake that he'd made with—
Even coming close to thinking her name silenced all the wailing inside him, the lack of sound hitting him harder than anything else could've. With any effort, Discord reformed his lion paw just long enough to snap away the white flowers and banners from every lamppost in Canterlot, change the thousands of bridal shops in town back to whatever they'd been before, and let Twilight's dress dissolve, dripping like melting snow down into his liquid self.
He heard her sigh. "We can stay here as long as you need to," she said, "but Applejack and Pinkie are putting together a good, old-fashioned, earth pony wake tonight just the way Fluttershy wanted. There'll be singing and crying and eating and stories." One of her hooves stirred through him. "It won't help much, but it will help some."
Throughout his gelatinous ooze, thoughts of freezing himself and her and the rest of Equestria into a solid mass of ice warred with thoughts that came to him tinged in yellow and pink: Twilight had lost a friend this morning, too.
Dredging the bottom of his own slew, he forced himself to rise up beside her. "It's just occurred to me," he said in a voice he scarcely recognized, "that you knew her longer than I did."
Twilight's eyes pulled shut, and Discord could almost hear her letting go the iron grip she'd been keeping this whole time. "She was one of a kind," she said, the words wobbling.
Discord let his nod send a small wave to break against Twilight's side, and they sat there together for some time.
It didn't help much, no. But yes, it did help some.
