Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Chit-Chat
Celestia stared at the statue in the palace gardens.
How many times had she come out here, over countless years? It'd been much more frequent after she'd lost Luna. She would come and look upon the enemy she and her sister had defeated once together, wielding the magic of their shared bond, and remind herself that Luna was still in that... thing that she had become. Her sister was alive, and the Elements had bought her time to do what she could to help her escape from the Nightmare's influence.
A thousand years. It had felt agonizingly, heartbreakingly long, and yet, when the deadline of the final summer had loomed, she had wanted to beg for more time. Time to make sure that Twilight Sparkle was ready, because they all only had one shot. But the stars would never listen to the pleas of a mare of the day.
She would come into the garden, and look upon Discord. At first, she would just sit and think, running the confrontation through her mind, his final laughter echoing in her ears. He'd never taken them seriously, not even in the last moments. To a draconequus, alicorns were like any other pony, nothing but puppets. He'd never comprehended the concept that they could be a threat.
The expression was different now. Discord looked desperate. Afraid.
The visits to Discord had started with just thinking. Then she'd started to talk. She'd known that petrification wasn't death. The Elements didn't kill, and she'd never been able to figure out if it was an inability or a refusal. She'd known Discord was alive, but she'd assumed it was something like the act of a cockatrice, locked in a stone sleep that he'd never wake from unless awoken. She'd needed to talk to someone else who had known Luna, even as an enemy. She'd needed to at least pretend that there was someone else who remembered her, before the Nightmare. So she'd talked, assuming that he couldn't hear her.
Wrong on both points, she supposed. The spell had eventually worn off on its own, and his knowledge of what and who to target pointed to him having been much more aware than she could have expected.
"Did you miss me, Celestia? I've missed you."
She'd stopped coming out here after getting her sister back. Maybe if she'd kept it up, she would have noticed the stone cracking.
No, she couldn't think like that. She'd lived long enough that she could drown herself in thoughts of what she could or should have done at crucial points, but nopony could change the past. She could only look toward the future, and try to do better moving forward. It was all anypony could do. Dwelling on past mistakes was among many, many ways to ultimately go mad, and maintaining her sanity over the centuries had been a necessity when she was the only one managing the heavens.
It had all worked out. She'd put her trust in Twilight and her friends, and they'd been triumphant. The celebration had been held, and thanks given. At this rate, she was sure by the time the group were old mares, they would have every title and medal she could bestow, plus a few extras she'd need to invent on the spot.
Celestia looked into stone eyes, wide with terror. It was enough to, almost, summon a pang of sympathy.
"You should know," she told the statue, calmly, now knowing he could hear. "That I thought about letting you out." She took a few steps forward, barely feeling the grass beneath her hooves as she closed the distance. "About once every few decades, I'd deeply think about it."
Her face was directly in front of his, her nose nearly touching stone; her breath disturbed a leaf that had landed on him and sent it fluttering to the ground. "I'd think that maybe you'd learned your lesson, that you would finally understand what it was like to be helpless when you'd blinked and suddenly centuries had passed. That maybe, now, with something you could acknowledge as being on equal hoofing with you, there was a chance to come to an understanding, you and I." She tilted her head slightly, and the tip of her horn pointed directly at the centre of one of his eyes. "I now know that you would have laughed in my face at such an idea."
It would be so simple, right now, beneath my sun. Just charge my horn, take a breath, and kill a god.
If that would kill him.
If he can even die.
Celestia's tail lashed, and she pulled her head back. "Maybe you're still laughing at me now. Or maybe you're wishing you'd had a chance to take that olive branch. It doesn't matter anymore." She heaved a sigh and turned away. "See you in another thousand years, old enemy, when the cage weakens again. Our defenses will have adapted to your tricks, and I'll ensure there's a new set of Bearers to put you back."
Snap.
Her body went rigid.
It had taken centuries to keep from cringing away whenever a minotaur, griffon, or other creature blessed with similar forelimbs would snap fingers or talons. The sound was always associated in her mind with something happening. Something terrible and deadly in the guise of something comical. She had started to relax her guard, but with the recent escape so fresh in her mind and a painfully familiar magic filling the air, she already found the power racing down her horn.
The golden light in front of her started as pinprick, then expanded, stretching as it gained height, width, and depth, forming a towering something bedecked in gears, buttons, bulbs, and clock faces. Her wings flared open and one hoof tore into the earth as she prepared herself, and when the door on the front of the strange thing opened, she saw everything she'd feared.
"Celestia! Just the pony I wanted to see! Miss me?"
They were the only words before the blast from Celestia's horn tore his head from his shoulders.
No, to tear would imply that the head still existed. The truer description would be that everything above the red bowtie nestled in brown fur was obliterated by the force and heat of a beam of concentrated sunlight. She could feel her mane and tail turn into ethereal flame, as Celestia the pony briefly ceased to exist, replaced by the Avatar of the Sun.
She sensed the regalia on her head, neck, and hooves melting into golden slag. It spread through her coat, and would become fused to the white hairs when it cooled. The grass beneath her ignited, devoured by hungry flame that spread from her body in a ring. The stone of the statues started to degrade, but despite the destruction, she didn't relent until the snake-like body crumpled in on itself like an accordion.
What remained of Discord lay smoking in the ashes of what had once been grass, and Celestia breathed a deep sigh. Her mane slowly shifted back, and she carefully pulled her hooves out of her shoes while they were still molten. She hadn't channeled that much power in a very long time, and a normal spring afternoon was suddenly far too cold compared to the magic of the sun.
Then one of the arms lifted, and the eagle talons snapped.
"Ah yes, I forgot how blasty you were at this point in time." Discord was whole again. So were her regalia, the statues, and even the grass was restored to a lively green. There was a red fez in his lion paw, and he brushed it off before placing it on his head. "But I suppose that is my fault."
Celestia didn't let herself reel too long in shock, and tapped the sun again. If the head didn't work, then she'd just have to widen the beam to catch his whole body in the blast.
"Ah ah ah." He snapped, and appeared directly above her, reaching down to pinch the tip of her horn. She jerked her head away from him with a frantic flapping of her wings, but the damage was done. An icy chill raced from the point of contact right to the base, seeping in with a cold pain like brain freeze. "You got one free shot, but I don't want to spend this whole conversation reforming my body. It'd get very dull after the first few dozen times."
She tried to light her horn, tried to warm herself, to no avail. He may not have taken it, but the magic channels in it were locked up and numb, leaving it a useless lump of keratin. "How did you get out of stone, Discord?!" she demanded, voice spitting anger where her heart beat with terror. "The Elements--"
He snapped, and he was gone.
She looked around wildly, trying to see where he'd appear next, and she found him draped over his stone self, reduced to the size of a simple garden snake. "Oh, I didn't get out at all, as you can see. Or rather, I haven't yet." He produced a rag, and started to casually polish the antler of the terrified-looking statue. "The Discord your protégé and her friends just fought is very much trapped."
Celestia looked from the stone Discord to the live one, and took a breath. Stall for time. "And what does that make you?"
His smile was uncannily hideous, stretching his face in a way that nothing that looked so similar to a pony should be able to move. "Why, my dear Celestia, I am a future, much kinder and gentler, Discord who's learned the magic of friendship."
It was then that Celestia recognized the nature of the power heavy in the air. A unicorn with a horn locked like this would effectively be magically blinded, but alicorns had no such limitations. She'd reacted so strongly to the that fact she'd sensed him, that what he was doing had eluded her, but now it was obvious that the garden was blanketed in the tell-tale signature of temporal magic. Concentrate enough, and she could even find the notes in the spell, that Star Swirl had taught her, that identified it as a transport from the future.
But while the time travel part was evidently true, the rest of Discord's statement was the first thing he'd ever said that made her want to laugh. Instead, her voice came out with practiced steadiness. "You. Learned the magic of friendship."
"Right you are! And you, in your great wisdom, are the one who's going to give me a chance." The polishing rag warped, imploded inward, then vanished with a shower of rainbow sparks, and Discord slithered off the statue into the grass. "Which is half of why I'm here, to thank you." The too-wide smile grew wider. "If you hadn't had the Bearers release me and task them with reforming me, I would still be in stone."
She'd been trying to keep a rein on her emotions, but she knew he'd been able to see her look of horror and rage. "And I'm supposed to believe I'd take a risk like that with my ponies? With Twilight?"
The chortle that Discord gave was surprisingly restrained. "Oh, your little purple surrogate daughter will have words for you about it. Really, if it weren't for Fluttershy, she would have had me resume my lawn ornament impression as fast as--" Snap, and he was lying on his back on top of the statue of the first captain of her Solar Guard, the bowtie and fez replaced with a pair of sunglasses and a chocolate milkshake. "But it doesn't really matter whether you believe me or not. It's still going to happen. You know as well as I do that I can't change the past. One of the few rules--" He briefly looked like he'd eaten something bitter at the word. "--That my magic can't break. So no matter what you do, I still go free."
Rage was burning its way past the horror. She gritted her teeth as she tried to force magic, any magic, through her horn. If she could just teleport, get to her sister... "So you're here to gloat before you go back to your time?"
Discord raised a talon and wagged it. "Thank, not gloat. After all, in that situation, you got exactly what you wanted." He tilted the shades down so that she could see the red-and-yellow eyes peeking over them, then saw them all the clearer when they rolled so hard they left the sockets. "You were terribly smug about it at the time."
The eyes continued to roll, heading down his body, until a flick of his tail sent them into the air and landing in the milkshake, where they stared at her through the glass as he nonchalantly sipped from the straw. "And I did just say it was half of my reason. The other half is this."
There was no snap this time. Just a flash, and him standing in front of her, back to his usual size and eyes where they should be. "I'm sorry."
Celestia stared.
There were no more tricks of magic, no more words. Just Discord standing there, smile gone from his face, looking vaguely like a repentant schoolcolt after a prank gone wrong. She found her mouth opening, then closing, repeating the action a few times before words could form. "You're... sorry?"
"Yes, terribly sorry." He reached behind his body and pulled a bouquet of pink roses from nowhere. She could tell from the scent that they were her favourite, but the continued numbness in her horn had her stomach churning unpleasantly, and even if they weren't from him she would have had no interest in eating. "As I said, I owe my turning over a new leaf to Fluttershy, and she's been teaching me about this novel concept called apologies. And, well..." His voice softened, and it was the first time she had ever heard him sound sombre. "It's come to my attention that I have a lot to apologise for."
"You're sorry."
"You're starting to repeat yourself, Celly old girl."
"You..." This wasn't one of his usual tricks. Oh, he could behave in a manner that could be interpreted as friendly, at least for a little while, until the cracks showed. He'd done it with her and her sister, before, inviting them to play a game. But that was the thing, that he was always playful. She hadn't known he was capable of acting contrite. "You felt the need... to time travel... to apologise for what you did to Equestria."
"What I did to you," Discord corrected. "Apologising for the state I put Equestria into should probably involve apologising to more Equestrians than just the one." His shoulders gave a shrug. His odd wings stayed stationary despite the movement of their supposed anchor points. "Given that you were present for both of my reigns, I felt it was best to start with you. And Fluttershy told me that it's good to apologise as soon as possible after a transgression. I could have gone all the way back to the first incident, but I thought this may be more practical--"
"Princess!" Discord, and the box from which he'd emerged, vanished. Celestia kept her sigh of relief internal as a dozen guards approached her. "We sensed magic and saw light! What's going on?"
She looked at the earth pony stallion in front of her. In her mind's eye, she was seeing what Discord had done to him not long ago, the proud pony barking like a dog and chewing on his own helmet like it was a toy. I need to choose my words carefully. "At ease, Lieutenant. I was just doing a bit of target practice with my sunbeam spell." She dipped her head with a soothing smile. "You may return to your post."
Lieutenant Morning Glory's eyes briefly widened in understanding, and he hesitated for a moment before saluting. "As you command, Your Highness."
The guards turned to leave, and Celestia let herself give a genuine smile. All Solar Guards were taught that target practice meant danger and you may return meant contact help. They'd go to Luna, and Luna would know what to do.
She knew that they would've preferred a proper briefing rather than to be sent off with the barest of code words, but Discord could tear through the minds of even trained guardponies. Only the six who'd been able to regain themselves would have a chance. He had to believe that they weren't a threat, let the guards go because he had her to toy with and she was the more valuable--
"He's a good choice."
She looked down, and a pink rose by her hoof was looking up at her with red and yellow eyes. "For what?"
"For your sister's personal guard." The flower with his face hummed and he tapped his chin with the tip of a leaf. "This is around when he'll be requesting a transfer to her service, if I recall correctly."
I wasn't aware you could even tell my guards apart. Discord had so rarely bothered to even learn a pony's name and his spell on the Royal Guard had been a blanket one, no personalizing their torment. Morning Glory had just hoofed over paperwork for a transfer, but for him to know and remember a detail so mundane about an ordinary pony...
Discord was a trickster. He could change tactics if it suited him. Doing the same thing every time would bore him, after all.
Feeling was returning to Celestia's horn, and more importantly, she could feel the surroundings warping. Time magic had many limits, and the longer a creature spent in another time, the more their proper one tried to pull them back. Even Discord wasn't free of the Law of Temporal Anchoring. Whatever his plan, she'd stalled him long enough that he didn't have much more time.
Just keep him talking a little longer. "You said that you're apologising for what you did to me." She gave flower-Discord a hard stare, as if he were a misbehaving colt. "I would like some specifics on what you're sorry for."
"I suppose that's fair." The flower grew larger, and Discord shifted back to his usual form before he pulled out a scroll and cleared his throat. "I'm sorry for sending a stampede of jackalopes through your home village, for the grape juice rainclouds, for enchanting those sunflowers to make fun of the size of your backside..."
As the scroll unrolled, it struck the ground and kept going, requiring Celestia to step out of its path. "...For cheating during our game of hide and seek, for taking you and your sister's horns and wings without permission for the game of hide and seek, for putting you both in those clown outfits, for the roc in the obstacle course, for laughing in your face when you showed up with the Elements..."
He took a deep breath, which Celestia was almost positive he didn't actually need to do. "And I'm sorry for stealing the Elements when I broke out, for making fun of you in front of your prized pupil, for playing with your stained glass windows, for trapping you in your room in the palace, and for turning your throne into lime jello and whipped cream."
"Hide and seek" is a generous descriptor. So is "obstacle course." The warping in the air was thickening, and Celestia gave a tight nod. "When I feel you've earned my forgiveness, Discord, I'll let you know," she told him. "But it won't be any time soon. After all you've done, a single apology doesn't make it right."
"Ah yes, atonement. I've been learning about that too. It's a good thing that beings like you and I have all the time in the world, then." He reached into a sudden pocket in his fur, pulling out a pocket watch with a clock face covered in imaginary numbers. "Speaking of time, I'd best get back to my own. It's my turn to bring the snacks for tea time."
A final snap, and the strange box was there again. It looked terribly cramped inside as he slithered in, but he was Discord, and there wasn't place he couldn't make himself fit. "Arrivederci!"
Golden light flashed, the temporal warping in the air faded, and Discord was truly gone. Celestia, her body falling into shivers, collapsed to the grass, and she found that he'd left behind the apology bouquet. She still couldn't stomach the thought of eating it.
She didn't know how long she'd been there, before she finally lifted her head, looking to the stone Discord, right where he'd been the whole time. "I wonder if you're as confused as I am right now." She slowly got to her hooves on shaking legs. "That would be new. Almost as new as you apologising to me."
She needed to go find Luna and let her know that the danger had passed, for now. And in the meanwhile...
Discord couldn't change the past. Somehow, some way, he would get free, and then time travel back here. He could be trying to provoke her into paranoia. She would move the statue somewhere, put it under heavy guard, throw all the magic she had at it to keep anything from getting at it, and it would somehow be exactly what he needed to break himself loose. Or perhaps he'd been trying to provoke her into doing what she'd been contemplating and try to destroy the statue, and instead of killing him, that would instead set him free.
Or he was telling the truth.
It felt like mockery, and not even from him. Like the world itself was mocking her. She'd built her nation on the tenets of Harmony, had tried to foster a culture of forgiveness and second chances, and now the world saw fit to hand her her greatest enemy, saying he was sorry. It was like some force were asking her if the great Solar Princess had a limit on who'd she forgive, as if it were hunting for hypocrisy.
He was too dangerous to attempt reformation. Every time she'd found herself dwelling on giving him a chance, she'd ultimately decided that. She couldn't put her ponies in that much danger for the sake of a single redemption.
Then what would I call what I did with Luna?
Celestia had started spreading her wings to seek out her sister, but the thought made her falter. No, that was different. Luna had been a good pony who had fallen to darkness. Discord had always been this way, and had never shown anypony a shred of kindness.
Kindness. Fluttershy.
She had resisted him the most of all of the Bearers of Harmony. He'd had to brute-force his control of her, when he could normally get a mind to let him in. Perhaps, if anypony did have a chance of bringing about a change of heart in the heartless, it was her.
Celestia took to the air, leaving the statue garden behind. There was no need to be hasty. She would talk to Luna, and see what she thought of the whole situation. Her perspective would be valuable on whether the risk was worth taking, but she still wouldn't take it any time soon. She had researchers already working on new wards for the Elements, ones even Discord would not be able to break. Only after those were developed, and everypony had had time to heal from the chaos he'd so recently wrought, would she consider entertaining his rehabilitation.
As she soared off toward the palace, the fearful stone eyes seemed to watch her go.
