Fluttercruel was in her gentle aspect when she arrived, which made Discord struggle not to cry with relief. He cried so much lately. It was completely humiliating. He'd even cried in front of Twilight last night, hunger weakening him to the point where he hadn't been able to endure being prepared for another torture session without breaking down in tears of despair. He had to muster up more strength than this. Apparently, seeing him already covered in blood and injuries that she didn't have to inflict on him, and hearing from Applejack that he'd broken at the end and therefore deserved to be rewarded for breaking, not punished further for resisting, triggered Fluttercruel's kindness instincts, and she bandaged and treated his wounds with compassion, using a great deal of painkilling salve. By the time she was done he couldn't feel his damaged wing anymore, which was an improvement over the agony it had been in.
She led him back to her home the usual way, the leash on his collar attached to a harness around her hoof, forcing him to walk on all fours. Discord was as adept at moving on all fours as he was at going bipedal, but they meant different things to him; fours was for covering distance rapidly or for sneaking, bipedal was for interacting with ponies since it allowed him to use his full height for its intimidation value. Being forced to walk through Ponyville, injured, at Fluttercruel's pace, on all fours with a leash around his neck, was sickeningly humiliating.
At least she didn't have a muzzle on him this time. Or a bridle and a bit in his mouth. If a pony put reins on another pony in public it would be viewed as obscene, a bedroom game that the participants should have kept in the bedroom; but on a creature that wasn't a pony, it made ponies think not of kinky sex games, but of pets and of dangerous wild animals being restrained to tame them. Most ponies weren't xenophilic enough to recognize him as a potential sex object, so Fluttercruel could drag him through the town in abject slavery without embarrassing herself; her fellow townsfolk saw what she was doing as playing her role as an Element of Harmony and taming the cruel chaos monster, not as what it actually was, a sexualized dominance ploy. So Discord got to be simultaneously humiliated that he was being viewed as an animal rather than a sentient being, and that his captor was enjoying his humiliation and submission entirely too much and in thoroughly unhealthy ways.
In the beginning she'd never taken him anywhere without muzzling or bridling him first, so he'd never been able to talk and prove himself sentient; now she let him keep his mouth free so long as he didn't use it, but the moment he tried to talk she'd order him to conjure a muzzle or bridle around himself. Of course, the ponies of Ponyville knew who he was, and they feared and hated him for it, but Discord knew very well that ponies would automatically perceive a large predator as a fierce and dangerous beast rather than an intelligent being like themselves unless said predator talked, and at his size and with the natural weaponry on his body, the parts of him that were ponylike were not enough to make ponies perceive him as one of them. So he knew, as he walked through the town silently, that even though they knew who he was and even though they knew he was intelligent, they were perceiving him at some level as a monster, a mindless vicious animal, that Fluttercruel was taming -- not a being with the same feelings and intelligence as a pony who was being mistreated and enslaved, not even a criminal who deserved to be publicly humiliated. An animal.
He wondered if Celestia had told Fluttercruel about his past (or if he'd even had the same past in this timeline), or if she'd just managed to get lucky and hit on the ancient sore spot. It had been thousands of years ago but Discord still remembered being captured by ponies when he was a child and didn't speak their language, mistaken for a non-speaking animal, and caged and treated like a ferocious beast rather than the terrified little colt that he'd been. If this one had had the same background... then this Celestia was definitely actively in on this, because there was no way this was a coincidence and there was no way any being but Celestia would know his past.
Once they were back in Fluttercruel's house, Fluttercruel unbuckled the leash from his collar. "Put the shields up around the house?" she said, in the same quiet, uncertain, questioning tone that the real Fluttershy, his Fluttershy, would have used, except that the magical shields in question were intended to keep anypony from hearing, seeing or walking in on the things Fluttercruel tended to do to Discord, and the incongruence between the gentle tone of the order and the purpose of it was a knife in Discord's heart. Funny. He was normally a big fan of incongruence.
"Now lay down, wings flat," Fluttercruel said. "We're going to treat those injuries, okay? After what Twilight put you through last night, you should have been a little bit more obedient for Applejack; I let you heal yourself last night, but I can't give that to you again so soon. You should have known."
He had known. It hadn't changed the fact that he couldn't do the job. He'd packed the baskets full of apples, but Applejack had demanded he do it evenly, except that didn't even mean make it the same number of apples, it meant make it come up to the same level and there had been no way. Discord couldn't even see unevenness; the baskets had actually looked entirely too even and regular to him, so he had thought he must have done it right. He didn't bother to point this out. It wouldn't help him any, and if Fluttercruel decided it was backtalk, it could hurt him quite a lot.
Last night... well, last night had been awful, as every time he was sent to Twilight was, but he'd accomplished the goal he'd been working toward. For what felt like it had been nearly forever, Discord had been writing a letter, using his own blood and the dirt of his basement prison for ink and his talon for a quill (except on the days when it was hurt too badly to move it, when he'd use one of the digits of his paw), on paper he used the remnants of his magic to make out of wood shavings and his own torn skin. Realistically he thought it was about three weeks, almost half of the two months he'd been here; he was forced to see Twilight two days a week, like clockwork, and he'd been to see her six times during the time he was writing the letter. He'd poured out the entire history of how he'd gotten here and everything that had happened to him since in a desperate and lengthy plea for his own Twilight Sparkle to come save him. The whole time he'd been writing it, he'd been more than halfway convinced it wasn't going to help, that his Fluttershy might care for him and call him a friend but his Twilight still despised him... but he had no choice. It was the only hope he had. He had saved a tiny bit of magic to cast onto Spike so that the letter would go to Spike's cognate in Discord's own universe, and he'd managed to persuade Spike to send it last night, after Twilight's experiments were done for the evening.
Spike had thought Discord was asking him to send the letter to Celestia. It had been so, so hard not to tell the little dragon the truth. Discord couldn't actively lie at all; the spell simply wouldn't let him form words that weren't true. He could omit information, but at a price, a price he'd paid last night when he'd vomited so much and so hard that in the end nothing had been coming up but thin bile and blood. But he'd done it. Spike had jumped to the conclusion that Discord was sending the letter to Celestia because he had some advice for the princess on how to return the Element Bearers to their prior selves, and Discord had carefully managed to never address that conclusion for yay or nay, focusing on telling Spike why somepony had to fix the Elements and managing to never mention the fact that that had no connection to his letter.
The omission of facts had led to acute nausea and finally vomiting when it had overwhelmed him, and he'd had a very close call when Twilight had guessed that Discord throwing up meant Discord had been close-to-lying, and had said so in front of Fluttercruel, and the sadistic glee in the pegasus' voice when she'd pronounced that Discord needed a special punishment for that... he'd wanted to die. He'd been so exhausted and he'd hurt so badly from Twilight's experiments and he'd just drained every last dram of Chaos magic in his body and then every last bit of food or water in his stomach, and the thought of what Fluttercruel would do to him was just unendurable. But Spike had saved him, lying for him, claiming that Discord had said nothing at all... because Spike had believed him when Discord had confessed to him that this wasn't his universe, that the Discord who'd destroyed the Elements by fusing them with their opposites and in turn had been destroyed by Spike with a sledgehammer was still dead, just as Spike had left him, and Discord himself was from an alternate universe and innocent of that particular crime.
He didn't expect anything further from Spike. He hadn't, in fact, expected quite as much as he got. The little dragon was entirely under Twilight Sparkle's control, not through a spell but through the bonds of love and friendship, even though Discord would have thought those wouldn't work anymore because of how much Twilight had changed. But then, what did he know about it? He was no expert on friendship. And if a friend acting completely unlike the pony they'd been before made the bonds of love and friendship stop working entirely, then Fluttercruel's tortures wouldn't be nearly so hard for Discord to deal with.
This wasn't his first encounter with the concept, he supposed. He'd done things for Celestia long after she'd turned on him, after all.
But he was disharmony. He'd been closer to his enemies than to the friends he didn't actually have for centuries. He'd never held it against a pony that they were trying to kill him or turn him to stone; he'd felt great amused affection for many a pony who'd hated him and treated him with defiance and anger. To be honest, he hadn't really stopped loving Celestia until some centuries of being imprisoned in stone had gone by, even though long prior to that she'd abandoned him and then turned on him and fought him for years. Discord had always assumed that that came with the territory of being the spirit of disharmony, since it was much, much easier for him to break apart pony friendships than it was for the enemies he loved having to get him to genuinely hate them. Why would a being who was used to having genuine friends be willing to put up with them when they turned cold and cruel? Discord had caused friendships to break up over much less than how new Twilight was treating Spike.
It didn't matter. The letter was sent. It would probably come to nothing and he didn't quite dare hope it would actually lead to a rescue... but now he'd done everything it was in his power to do to save himself. All he could do now was endure without breaking for as long as he possibly could.
Which... might not be all that long, anymore. Fluttercruel had been putting more salve and bandages on him, and then had had him lie on his back, once the injuries on his back were dressed and slathered in painkilling ointments, so she could get at the underside of the damaged wing, where she'd stitched it and dressed it so it almost didn't hurt. And now she was nuzzling him, nose against his side, the soft fur of her foreleg and the tough skin-covered flexible cartilage of her hoof stroking over the fur of his chest and belly, down to where the fur grew through dragon scales and hid the transition between his upper and lower body. Discord shuddered. This wouldn’t be nearly as horrible if it didn't feel good. He'd considered his Fluttershy a friend, nothing more, but if she'd wanted him as hungrily, desired him as strongly, as Fluttercruel did, he would have responded; what Discord found most attractive in a potential sexual partner was them finding him attractive. Given how few ponies did, that particular preference had probably saved him a lot of heartache over the years. If Fluttercruel was the pony she looked and sounded exactly like, her caresses and nuzzles would feel wonderful.
But she wasn't.
"Applejack says you were a good colt today," Fluttercruel said sweetly, teasingly. "She said you messed up your job but you were sorry about it, that you took responsibility for your mistakes and regretted them. I like to hear that." She flapped her wings slightly and repositioned herself, nuzzling his neck now. This time the shudders that went through Discord were not of horror. "You're really starting to learn. I think you're well on your way to reforming, don't you?"
Discord closed his eyes. She had to use that word, the word his Fluttershy had used. "I'm trying," he said softly, because it was true enough; he was trying to obey, to succeed at the tasks he was given, because he didn't want to be punished. He didn't want to be obedient, but he didn't want to be tortured either, and most of the time that took precedence nowadays.
"You make me so happy when you're obedient," Fluttercruel said, sighing happily, sounding just exactly like his Fluttershy did when she was pleased with him and no, he was not going to break down in front of her, he was not going to cry, and he wasn't going to pretend she was really Fluttershy either. He would keep his eyes closed so he didn't have to watch, let her do what she wanted, and endure. This couldn't be breaking his heart, Celestia had done that centuries ago and now he didn't have one. He could take this. He had to.
"Will you make me happy, Discord?" He felt her shift on top of his neck, her legs on either side of his head, pinning him. "Open your eyes." Discord obeyed, looking up into those deep blue pools that looked just like his Fluttershy's eyes. "Will you make me happy?"
"I'll do whatever you say," he said dully, because that was true too; he didn't have a choice.
"Oh, don't look so sad about it. You know you'll like it." She planted a kiss on his nose, and then slid her body forward. "Make me happy, sweetie. You know what I like."
Yes. He did. He was grateful that the beating Applejack had given him seemed to be all the buildup she needed and she wasn't going to have to hurt him herself first. He was also grateful that he had the most amazingly flexible, lengthy and useful tongue of any creature on Equestria, because it made this a lot easier. She didn't have to sit directly on him, just stand over him, shuddering with excitement and whimpering in a tiny quiet voice that sounded much too much like his Fluttershy as he used his flexible neck and even more flexible tongue all over her underbelly, finally coming to where she wanted his attention the most and giving her what she wanted.
She was a toy. She was an object for him to manipulate, just like all ponies had been for centuries, a thing for him to do things to and get a reaction. She wasn't a thinking, feeling being that he actually cared about. He was pushing buttons – almost literally in this case – to achieve an effect, just as he'd done thousands of times to thousands of ponies that he'd tormented and terrorized. The only difference was, he'd done chaotic, non-sexual things to toy with their emotional states for his own amusement, in the past, and here, he was performing semi-predictable, sexual activities to toy with Fluttercruel's state of arousal for her amusement, at her orders. But it was the same thing. He told himself that.
She was not Fluttershy. He didn't care about her. When she moaned, and made her tiny little cries, and finally called his name as her hips bucked against his tongue, and she sounded exactly like his Fluttershy while she was doing it, exactly like he imagined she would anyway since he'd never taken the real thing to bed and had never expected to... that didn't mean anything at all. She was just an object he was manipulating. That was all.
He was pretty sure he used to be better at lying to himself.
"Oh, you're wonderful, sweetie," she sighed, snuggling against him. "You, uh, your, uh..." She lifted her head, her face red with embarrassment, blushing through her fur. "Your tongue was just made to please mares," she blurted out quickly and then buried her red face in his fur. Embarrassed by her own risque talk, despite what she did to him on a regular basis. Just like he suspected the real Fluttershy would be, if she took it into her head to try to talk dirty.
He was not going to cry. He was the God of Chaos for the sake of all that mattered. He had terrified ponydom for nearly a millennium. He was not going to cry because his torturer sounded just as embarrassed and shyly excited about her not-even-that-lewd praise of his bedroom techniques as his real best friend might have if he'd been with her by mutual consent and this wasn't rape and she wasn't holding him prisoner and torturing him on a regular basis and any of this had been real. Not going to cry.
She was nuzzling him again. All and any gods that were or are or will ever be... please make this stop. Please. No more. "Such a good colt," she said. "You deserve a reward, sweetie."
"You don't need to," he said hoarsely. "All I was trying to do was make you happy. I don't want anything for myself." Except peace and quiet and rest. Well, or impossible things, like full control of his powers back, or his former nemeses charging out of the portal he'd left by the Everfree to come to his rescue, or to suddenly have a heart attack and die.
"Oh, but you were so good," Fluttercruel said. "You deserve a reward."
His voice broke. "If it's a reward then why am I not allowed to say no?" he asked, breathing raggedly, trying not to crack.
Immediately he was afraid after he'd said it, and regretting the fact that it was very, very hard for him to keep his impulses under control even when the consequences of failure could be so dire. But she just giggled. "Silly! You're not allowed to say no to anything. That's why it's obedience training."
That's why it's rape, he thought, but managed not to say it. The last time he had called her ministrations rape, she had flown into a rage and told him that if he thought her being gentle and loving was rape maybe he needed a reminder of what rape was really like and that was quite enough of remembering that, thank you very much.
"Besides, you know you'll like it," she said. "You know you enjoy it when I'm nice to you." The last was almost a purr, but there was a cold edge to it.
Discord froze, his whole body tensing. No. No no no no. Please no. The last time she had felt the need to point out the difference between the behavior that was almost like the old Fluttershy and the behavior his counterpart had instilled in her, it had resulted in a lengthy demonstration of why he should prefer her being nice and why he should regret the day he had ever made her cruel. He remembered screaming that he was sorry, over and over again -- which he was, not in the sense of guilt, because he hadn't been the one that did it, but in the sense of regret, because once upon a time she had been a Fluttershy just like his Fluttershy and it was his cognate, his alter ego that had changed her and he was so very sorry that had happened to her and not even just because of what she was doing to him... although admittedly it was mostly because of what she was doing to him. It hadn't mattered. Nothing he'd done had mattered. It had all been about Fluttercruel wanting to hurt him, and it hadn’t ended until she'd been satisfied, long long past the point where Discord had stopped being able to beg or scream because his throat was too raw and he'd been reduced to weak, hopeless sobbing interspersed with moments of blacking out entirely.
Fluttercruel hated what she was even as she reveled in it, and frequently, she took her mixed feelings out on him, punishing him for giving her these horrible new urges and satisfying those urges at the same time.
"Yes," he said hastily. "I-- I definitely prefer it when you're nice." He hated it. But he hated it less than when she was cruel, so he could honestly say he preferred it. Funny. He remembered telling Fluttershy it was time to be cruel, and placing a mind control spell on her. But the cruel Fluttershy he'd created was simply a hilariously mean jerk. She wouldn't have been capable of this exquisitely evil combination of kindness and cruelty that was so, so much more destructive than straight-up cruelty ever could have been. He'd have to remember that, if he ever needed it in the future. Well, except that he didn't promote cruelty in ponies anymore, not since the real Fluttershy had become his friend. Which made it so unfair that this was happening to him now.
"Then stop telling me you want to say no," Fluttercruel said. "You wouldn't want to make me unhappy, would you?"
"No, of course not!" Because her being unhappy had a direct correlation with how much pain she'd inflict on him.
She kissed him. "I think you should be quiet now? Unless you want me to put the muzzle on you. We could do that if you'd like it that way."
"I'll be quiet," he said desperately. "Please, I—" She would not be moved by his terror of being completely unable to open his mouth. Quickly he thought of something, and then quickly rephrased it in his head so the whole sentence was technically true. "You can't kiss me when you muzzle me."
"Oh, you like it when I kiss you?" She did it again, and this time he tangled his tongue with hers, lifting his head and pressing his lips hard against her lips, feigning passion, so she wouldn't force him to actually answer that question, because she wouldn't like the answer he'd be forced to give. He wanted to put his arms around her to complete the pretense, but he wasn't allowed to touch her without permission.
"Mm, you do like that, don't you," Fluttercruel said. She was breathing hard. "Oh, I know what reward to give such a sweet little colt."
She kissed and nuzzled her way down his body. He was shaking, arousal that he didn't want but couldn't afford to try to fight off uncoiling inside him, terror of what would happen if this didn't and utter despair of what would happen if this did. When she reached his lower body, he was still sheathed, too frightened and miserable for the unwanted pleasure of her caresses to do its job. "Discord, sweetie, get hard for me," Fluttercruel said, face bright red again. "There's a good colt."
That was an order. He didn't have to try to force his body to respond or to not respond; it was out of his paws now entirely, the obedience spell taking over his autonomic nervous system. He felt his body respond to her order, the sheath being pushed out of the way and the growing organ within it pressing outward, but he felt almost completely detached from it. It didn't feel good, or bad for that matter, it was just a fairly meaningless physical change, like stretching his tail would be. That was actually a relief, one of the few times he appreciated the obedience spell.
Once she had enough of him exposed that she could accomplish her goals, he started feeling things again. Discord moved his head restlessly, looking everywhere except down at his captor and what she was doing to him. This wasn't going to end until he responded the way she wanted, so he didn't try to stop himself from feeling pleasure – not that that would have been particularly easy anyway, Discord had never been nearly as good at not feeling what he felt as he had been at not reacting the way anypony else would to those feelings. Instead, he pulled away in his mind, abandoning the place and time where things were happening to him that he didn't want. The world was dissolving into a cacophony of meaningless patterns upon patterns layered on top of each other where nothing had significance and nothing was important except snapping or reshaping as many of the patterns as he could; but he didn't have the power to do that right now, so the compulsions that usually overtook him when this happened felt more like deeply desired wishes than anything he absolutely had to do. Good enough.
Someplace there was a creature moaning in pleasure as a yellow pegasus sucked and licked and nibbled and finally climbed up on him and rode him, but that was meaningless too because it was all noise, all stupid patterns and he could see the places they would break if he could just reach out and do it and that was what was important here, not the thing from an extinct race writhing under the winged pony but the patterns and how breakable they were. Why was up up? Why wasn't it down? Why wasn't it purple? What if gravity and gravy were the same thing? What if field trips were avocados? What if skies could ride ponies? What if the secret of the universe was a nectarine? What if you could surf rugs? What if you could surf rugs on the ceiling? What if evil rabbits were rugs and you were surfing them on the ceiling? What if the draconequus on the floor had an orgasm and it didn't matter because nothing mattered because all there was, was patterns and nothing meant anything?
He wanted to laugh at how silly it all was but some survival instinct kept him grounded just enough to know to keep quiet. Things started to feel real again. The pony lying on top of him, panting. The hard wooden floor under his back. Aches and occasional shooting pains from the injuries all over his back and wings. The puddle of moisture on the insides of his hips and the exposed underside of his tail, slowly oozing down the sides of his tail and thighs to the floor.
"Oh, sweetie," Fluttershy was saying. She was on top of him, no longer engulfing him but legs still straddling him, the point of heat and moisture between her legs still pressed against his body, and she was blushing. No, not Fluttershy. Fluttercruel. There was a difference. It was important. He had to remember. "I love to make you happy. I wish you were obedient and good all the time, then I would never need to be mean to you."
He wished so profoundly that any of that were true. As reality and memory came back, he realized the danger he was in right now. Fluttercruel seemed to genuinely believe, or at least was fooling herself into believing, that she'd really rewarded him. And if he disabused her of that belief, he could expect nothing but pain. But with the honesty spell, if she actually asked him if he'd enjoyed it, there was no way he could give her a safe answer. Certainly he couldn't risk being pushed into telling her that he'd taken refuge in his chaos perceptions and the state of near-madness they brought so that he wouldn't have to be consciously aware of what she was doing to him. Discord felt incredibly vulnerable, on his back with belly and neck exposed and genitals not fully resheathed yet, with the tiny pony who had near-absolute power over him still on top of him, pinning him to the floor. Quickly, trying not to think about what he was doing, he whispered, "Can I thank you? Please, Fluttershy?"
Her voice grew suddenly hard. "Is that what you call me?"
"Please, mistress." He hated that. He hated it so much. He had never called anypony master or mistress. Well, okay, he'd called Starswirl master for about a month and a half before he'd decided to call him "teach" instead, because Discord had always considered it very important to make absolutely sure that everypony knew that he didn't think any of them were better than him. Starswirl had not been pleased, but the opportunity to train such a powerful student came along once in a lifetime, so he hadn't tried to pawn Discord off on a less knowledgeable teacher who'd put up with the lack of respect better.
"I'm not completely sure I'm hearing enough respect..."
"Please, mistress Fluttershy, can I thank you? Can I please you for what you've done for me?"
Fluttercruel giggled, a huge happy and embarrassed grin on her face. She was still aroused. He'd guessed right. He'd been too out of it to tell at the time but she hadn't come during intercourse; she'd gotten herself riled up and now she'd want more, and if he was proactive, and appeared to be submissive and genuinely desiring to please her, then she probably wouldn't hurt him to excite herself enough for a second one. He didn't want to do this, but if he did it, she wouldn't ask him whether he'd enjoyed being raped because his mouth would be otherwise occupied, and she wouldn't hurt him to prove her power over him because the fact that he appeared to be submitting willingly would be proof enough, and maybe he could fool her into thinking that he actually cared about her even slightly.
She fluttered up and forward, landed on his upper body, and snuggled against his neck. "Oh, you animal," she said, still giggling, though the term took on an entirely uglier meaning when you considered she was a xenophilic rapist who used to prey on non-sentients until she got hold of him instead. "Yes, you can thank me. But let's go to bed first, this floor isn't very comfortable, is it?"
It certainly wasn't. His injuries burned, not as badly as if there was no painkilling salve at all but much worse than they'd felt before she'd made him have sex with her on his back on the floor. He got up, aching, wishing he could go all the way up to two legs, but she never let him do that anymore. How a quadruped had figured out that being forced to go four-legged would humiliate an optional biped, he didn't know. Maybe she'd just figured out that she never wanted him to have his natural height advantage; his limbs were proportionately much shorter than pony limbs, so being four-legged left his torso at slightly shorter than average stallion height, and having a really long body didn't seem to intimidate ponies nearly as much as having a really tall body did. His neck was still longer than any pony's could possibly be, but he'd learned to keep his head more or less lowered to the same level as his torso or bent to be only slightly higher, because every so often Fluttercruel would take his attempts to keep his head raised as a symbol of defiance or arrogance, and what came after that was never anything he wanted to have to endure.
They walked to the bed. "Now, I don't want you bleeding on my sheets, so I'm going to let you heal a little bit, ok? I want you to scab the wounds over so they aren't bleeding anymore, but they should still hurt. That was an important lesson Applejack had for you today, and if we don't let it take some time to sink in she might have to do it again, and I know you wouldn't like that, right?"
He nodded as he obeyed. The flow of his magic felt wonderful, like water to a being dying of thirst, and the relief of the acute burning pain was lovely... but it was all too brief. He wasn't allowed to heal all the way, he wasn't allowed to continue to command his magic.
Discord cried out in pain as Fluttercruel suddenly punched a hoof into his injured wing. "What was that for?" he gasped, forgetting that he wasn't supposed to question.
"Just checking to see if you did it the way I told you to," Fluttercruel said. "And you did. Good colt. I'm so proud of you. Why don't you lay down on the nice soft bed?" He started to climb up into it and curl himself, as if he was going to go to sleep. "No, no, on your back, remember? You wanted to thank me." She giggled.
Right. He lay down on his back again, and then propped himself on his side with his talon. "Can I touch you... mistress?" Oh how he hated that word.
"You want to touch me?"
No. No, he didn't. He wanted to run away screaming. Instead he offered her his paw. "Most mares really enjoy it when I stroke them with this," he said. "They say it's very soft."
Fluttercruel's eyes narrowed. "I don't want to hear about other mares right now, Discord."
He cringed. "I—I'm sorry. I didn't mean – I just wanted to say I think you'd enjoy it if you let me touch you..."
Her dark expression softened, became a tender smile. "Oh, okay. Since you want to." She lay next to him, on her back, wiggling, offering herself. "Go on, Discord. Thank me if you want to."
This was almost bearable. He was sort of in control here; he'd volunteered rather than being ordered, he was being allowed to use his paw and to move his body rather than being pinned under her. The spells kept him from doing anything that might possibly cause her harm, but if he licked and stroked her to orgasm multiple times until she fell asleep from exhaustion before putting him back in his cell, that wasn't harmful at all. She'd love that. And he'd love to be able to sleep in a bed for once, in a moonlit room that would fill with sunlight in the morning, even if it meant sleeping next to his tormentor. Oh, what if he could get up once she was asleep and raid her pantry? What if he could have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Or two? She'd surely catch him if he stole food that was easy to count, like apples, but two slices of bread from a whole load and enough peanut butter and jelly from the jars to slather on the bread wouldn't be missed, and if he cleaned up any mess he made she'd never know.
What if he could use a bathroom instead of pissing in a corner and having to smell it until she allowed him to use his magic to clean it up? What if he could drink as much water as he wanted? The possibilities danced before him. All he had to do was please Fluttercruel until she passed out. Given how exhausted he was, that wasn't the most pleasant of prospects, but the possible reward if he pulled it off gave him energy.
Discord had been very, very experienced before he'd spent a thousand years in stone. Xenophiles were a minority among ponies, but when you were the most famous, powerful and strange-looking creature in Equestria, there was no need to go looking for xenophilic partners; they'd found him. After Discord had taken over Equestria he had never had any shortage of ponies, and other species, seeking him out. This did mean he hadn't had opportunities to get back into practice since being un-statued, either after breaking free on his own or after being freed at Celestia's command – he found partnered sex pointless if it wasn't with someone who wanted him badly enough to approach him with an offer, and he'd had much higher priorities than sex since getting free -- but sex was one of those things you just didn't forget how to do even if you spent a thousand years as a statue. And it had always been a point of pride for him that his ability to manipulate ponies into paroxysms of ecstasy was as well honed as his ability to manipulate them into acts of greed, malevolence or despair. Admittedly it'd been easier to do it with his powers, but he'd learned to use his body to please a lover before he'd learned fine control of chaos. That wasn't something he'd forgotten, either.
Back in the old days, many of the ponies who'd come to him had been more than a little frightened of or shocked by their own desires. And he'd enjoyed that, truly he had, he liked straightforward honest lust but he also liked messing with pony heads. When they'd been trembling with desire for him and simultaneously afraid of him and sickened by their own belief in how wrong their desires were, it had been so delightful to pleasantly torment them into boneless puddles of pleasure (not literally; he could have done it literally but that didn't actually sound like any fun at all) without taking anything for himself, just to hit their expectations upside the head and knock them over, because they'd thought they were giving themselves to a monster out of sick, twisted, perverse desires and ended up with a lover who really, really enjoyed making them love every moment of it. Oh, and then they felt so guilty over having seen him as a monster and how selfish they'd been giving nothing back to him, and then they'd fallen all over themselves to please him and that had been marvelous too. (And then the part where he'd declared that he was bored with them now and had tossed them out on their rumps as soon as they'd started the sappy talk had also been tons of fun but that made him feel more than a little guilty now.)
So he knew exactly what he was doing. And by the time he was done with it, Fluttershy (no, no, Fluttercruel, remember it) was practically purring with delight in the afterglow of multiple orgasms. She snuggled up next to him and fell asleep right there on the bed, just as he'd planned, leaving him totally unsupervised and unchained.
He could escape.
The thought struck him like a thunderbolt. He'd been thinking so small. Go steal snacks. Go pee in a bathroom. The door wasn't locked. Neither were the windows, and while jumping out of a window with no magic and his wings in this condition wouldn't be pleasant, he was tall enough that the distance to the ground was not much more than his full height standing. Or, a downstairs window would work too. The portal to his home dimension was near the Everfree, and maybe, maybe he could summon up enough magic to open it, or at least maybe he could hide in the Everfree until he managed to build up enough magic to open it.
He could be free. Without waiting for rescue, without having to die. He could be free.
Discord started to sit up, at which point he realized that Fluttercruel was sleeping on his bad wing.
No. No. He wasn't going to let something like this stop him. Not when he could be free. He pulled, gritting his teeth against the pain. Fluttercruel didn't budge, and his wing remained stuck.
Without his magic, Discord's wings weren't very strong, almost vestigial. He'd spent a few years in his childhood with them clipped together more or less perpetually, and they hadn't really naturally grown with the rest of his body since. It wasn't an issue he'd ever bothered to try to permanently fix, since most of his magic was deliberately impermanent anyway and because when he actually needed powerful working wings he could always grow them out, and he rarely needed powerful wings because his magic could negate gravity anytime he wanted. So now that he didn't have his magic to either negate gravity or expand his wings, it was very difficult for him to fly and it turned out it was incredibly difficult for him to pull the wing out from underneath a little yellow pegasus without disturbing her sleep. Maybe he'd have been able to do better if the wing weren't injured, but Fluttercruel hadn't let him completely heal it.
He lay on the bed, panting with effort. He couldn't be kept from escaping, from freedom, by such a stupid thing. Pain didn't mean anything, couldn't mean anything. He couldn't allow it. He had to get his wing loose.
The spells on him wouldn't allow him to touch Fluttercruel without her permission. He couldn't simply pick her up and lift her off the wing, even though his arms were strong enough to do so and he could do it gently, without disturbing her, because he wasn't allowed to touch her. The thought occurred to him that she had given him permission to touch her, that she'd never technically rescinded that permission, but when he tried, the loyalty spell – really a spell intended to prevent him from harming his captors, but Twilight had insisted on calling it a loyalty spell – caught him and froze him, because his intent wasn't for his captor's benefit. He didn't intend to harm her, just get free – by now he didn't even fantasize about vengeance, he just wanted to escape and never see these twisted parodies of the ponies he knew again – but he could touch Fluttercruel when she ordered him to or during sex, with her permission, because it was for her benefit or at her command. He wasn't allowed to touch any of them for reasons that benefited him.
Discord pulled again. No good. The wing wasn't even budging. At this point, like an animal in a trap he was seriously considering ripping the wing off with his talon. He could wrap his tail around the bone, break it, then use his talon to rip the skin and muscle free so he could pull his wing off entirely. Once he was home and free of these spells he could regrow the wing.
Except that Discord knew exactly how much it hurt to be dismembered. Pinkie Pie hadn't taken his wings because she'd been using them, along with his shoulders, to pin him to the wall, using a handful of sharp spikes through them, like pins through a butterfly. But he couldn't imagine that ripping off his wing would hurt less than having his arm sawed off. He also remembered fainting from blood loss and pain repeatedly, and only the obedience spell and Pinkie's repeated orders to wake up and pay attention because it was no fun if he was going to sleep through it had kept him conscious. Even if he could bring himself to rip off his own wing, if he then blacked out from pain and shock he still wouldn't get away. And it would be obvious to Fluttercruel what he'd been trying to do, and then losing his wing would probably be the least painful thing he suffered.
He was stuck. He had a perfect chance to escape and he was going to lose it because he hadn't been careful to prevent Fluttercruel from falling asleep on top of his wing and he was never going to have a chance like this again and he was never going to be free—
Raw panic hit, the horror and claustrophobia of being trapped immobile in stone for a thousand years and now two months of this crashed over him, and he lost all sense of reason, of control. He flung himself away from Fluttercruel wildly, desperately, over and over, tail curled around a bedpost and pulling with all his strength, arms flailing out to try to grab the other bedpost so he could increase his leverage, throwing and pulling and throwing and pulling until finally, finally it felt like the wing was starting to budge and he threw all his strength into folding it back, pulling it free, knocking the pegasus loose and he fell, free at last, tumbling off the bed onto his face but it didn't matter because he could get up and get free and—
"What do you think you're doing?"
No. No no no.
She hadn't given him an order yet. Discord ran on all fours for the window, desperately.
"STOP!"
Five seconds. He had five seconds after an order. He could keep running, he could throw himself through the window. But then the spell would force him to stop. He'd be out of the house, down on the ground, but he wouldn't be able to move... and Fluttercruel would know he had just tried to escape. He couldn't do it. It wasn't going to succeed, and if it wasn't going to succeed, he couldn't afford to give away that he'd tried. Tears welled up in Discord's eyes as he brought himself to a halt before the spell forced him to. He'd been so close. So close.
"So." Fluttercruel's voice was cold and vicious. "Exactly what were you trying to do?"
"I'm sorry," Discord whimpered, which was true, he was very, very sorry that she'd woken up and stopped him. "You were sleeping on my wing, it was hurting me, I'm sorry..."
"You yanked yourself out from under me and knocked me off the bed just because your wing hurt?" Fluttercruel shouted.
That was not a question he dared answer, because of course the wing hurting, while true, hadn't actually been his motivation at all. Instead Discord lowered his head to the floor, trying not to sob. "I'm sorry, mistress, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you or disturb you, I'm so sorry..."
"I bandage you up. I give you a reward. I let you sleep in a bed, I even let you heal yourself most of the way. And THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME?" The last was a psychotic shriek. Discord curled his tail around his legs, trembling, wings and limbs pulled in as close to his body as he could, as if there was any way he could protect any part of himself once Fluttercruel started.
The thought occurred to him that she hadn't told him not to start running again. "Stop" was a discrete activity; now that he had stopped, he had satisfied the requirements of the spell. Maybe she would turn away for a moment and he could run again. If he could get through the window before she told him to stop again...
"Oh, don't you dare even think about running," Fluttercruel snarled, and destroyed that hope. "You think I didn't see you trying to run away from me before I told you to stop? You had better stay right there and take your punishment, mister."
And now there was no way out. He couldn't run. "I'm sorry, please, I'm sorry..." In mid-plea his voice broke and he started crying with fear (and grief at the lost opportunity, he'd been so close, so close, but he couldn't let Fluttercruel know that, whereas he absolutely needed her to know how terrified he was because if she thought he wasn't scared enough she'd make it much worse).
"Oh, you will be sorry," Fluttercruel said. "You'll be very, very sorry. I was kind to you tonight, but that was a mistake, wasn't it! You're the one who told me it was time to be cruel; I should remember that that's the only thing you respect!"
"Please, please, mistress Fluttershy, please don't punish me, please, it was an accident, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I never meant to wake you, I'm sorry..."
"Muzzle yourself. With the gag bit," Fluttercruel ordered.
Discord's eyes went wide. "No, please, I'll be quiet, I'll—" And then he couldn't speak anymore as his own magic betrayed him, as the obedience spell forced him to materialize a buckled muzzle around his snout, with a bit in his mouth keeping him from biting down all the way and a cylindrical rubber gag attached to the bit, unpleasantly phallic, pinning his tongue in place and filling his mouth. He choked, gagging, for a moment, before he managed to shift his jaw and tongue in a way that accommodated the thing he'd been forced to put in his mouth. Discord breathed heavily through his nostrils, panting, wild with terror and now unable to get quite enough air to satisfy lungs that wanted to hyperventilate.
"And not only did you wake me up, not only did you try to run away from me when you first woke me up... now you just tried to resist your orders. That's bad, Discord. That's very, very bad. That's even worse than waking me up." He whined with fear. There was no escaping this, whatever it was going to be. He couldn't even beg with the gag in.
Fluttercruel walked around in front of him. "Now." Her voice was cold. "What do I have to punish such a naughty little colt with? Applejack gave you a whipping today and it doesn't seem like it taught you anything, did it? Maybe we need something... special."
Stop crying. Stop crying. She isn't even doing it yet, you look like such a pathetic coward, can't you save the waterworks until she actually starts the punishment? Stop crying!
His angry admonishments to himself didn't do him any good. He was still sobbing with terror, the sound muffled by the gag and the muzzle pinning his mouth closed but in his own ears it was louder than anything. If he'd had time to brace himself, if he'd known she would wake up or that he would be punished, he could have held the tears back, but he'd been so, so close to being free and now he was going to be tortured again and he just couldn't take the sudden snap from one extreme to the other. Which admittedly would have its funny side, that he of all beings would be breaking down in terror because of events he could have handled better if they'd been predictable, except that right now nothing was funny.
"Twilight gave me a present last night," Fluttercruel said. "When I came to pick you up."
After he'd gotten Spike to send that letter. Please, let the letter have gone through. Please let Twilight Sparkle have compassion for him and come and save him from this. He had no idea who he was asking for these things, he didn't believe that any of the gods higher than him actually paid attention to such pleas, and why would they? He certainly didn't.
"She gave me a special new whip. Very special."
Discord's mind fixated on his world's Twilight. Princess Twilight, the alicorn, different from this world's Twilight in every respect imaginable. Unlike all the others, they didn't even look that much alike. He could picture his Twilight in his mind without any interference from images of his tormentor because the Twilight of this universe had no wings. Help me, Twilight, please, please, help me... Not that she could possibly come in time to save him from what was about to happen right now. Nothing would save him from that.
"She said it's a diamond that's been spun into a single thread, with magic. She said it's the sharpest, strongest wire magic can produce. You don't seem to be responding to the rope with the diamonds in it so well anymore, but let's see what you think of a whip that is a diamond."
Discord went ice cold. He felt like his heart had just stopped. And then he forced himself to breathe, forced the terror down, as numb resignation washed over him. If Twilight had turned a diamond into a thread, then the whip Fluttercruel was picking up, mouth on its handle, was monofilament carbon. With his magic, Discord would easily have been able to deflect or heal from such a weapon; monofilament carbon didn't have magical properties per se. But it had physical properties. Namely that it could cut through flesh like a knife through jello. And without command of his powers, Discord was as much flesh as any other creature.
This was how he died, he thought, hopelessness stilling his limbs and quieting his sobs. He couldn't speak to warn Fluttercruel that this weapon would slice right through him, that the whip she was about to wield would literally cut him in half. Well. It was ironic after he'd just managed to send the message to call for help, and bitter after he'd just been thinking he might be able to get free without dying, but the truth was, it would be a quick death and then he would be free. Not painless – he was sure being sliced into pieces was actually going to hurt a great deal – but quick.
He was resigned, even accepting. A quick death was actually a much more merciful fate than what he'd been expecting from Fluttercruel's rage. And hilarious, really, she didn't know she was about to kill him and then wouldn't she be so upset that she'd broken her toy? Discord was quiet now, eyes closed, waiting for his end. His body wasn't quite as resigned and accepting as his mind was; he trembled, he was still hyperventilating, his heart was still thundering in his chest, his wings and his back muscles cringed as if they could possibly curl themselves away from the oncoming whip and save him. But he couldn't control these physical reactions. In his mind, he had gone all the way through surrender and despair and out the other side, almost to a fragile sense of peace. Maybe at least he could die with dignity, if he couldn't have anything else.
It was actually pathetically funny when you thought about it. She didn't even know he'd been trying to escape. She was about to kill him by accident for knocking her out of bed when he was trying to get his wing free. What a totally ridiculous reason to die. Fitting, really. He should have known his death would come for an enormously stupid reason.
He'd died before, but with his magic, so he'd been powerful enough to bring himself back. With his magic so limited, he knew this would be the last death, the end he wouldn't return from.
He wondered if that meant he would finally get to see his mother again. He'd never found her before when he'd walked in the land of the dead, but he'd never spent much time being dead so he couldn't know for sure.
He wondered if his Fluttershy would actually miss him when he was gone.
He was pretty sure Celestia wouldn’t.
And then the whip came down.
It didn't feel like a whip. It felt like a sword, slicing through his back. Discord screamed through the gag, unable to stop himself from reacting to the pain. He'd wanted so much to have some dignity when he died. Well, looked like that wasn't going to happen any more than a rescue would.
It came down again, opening another line of fire across his back, and then again, and wait, what? Why wasn't he dead? The wire should have sliced through him and cut him in half. Was it so fine that it was simply going through his cells, not even splitting him apart? He twisted his body, putting his muscles under torque so that if a force sliced through them, gravity would pull the two halves apart. Another razor blow, and he still didn't fall apart. It wasn't killing him.
Discord craned his head back to see the weapon, just in time to watch it slice through his injured wing. He cried out in agony. The membrane and the lower bone had been sliced through entirely, and now a third of the wing was dangling off the thicker upper bone like a piece of cloth dangling from a rack. So much blood. He could see his own spine through the new wounds on his back. The wire was braided, not a single strand.
Hilarious. Discord started to laugh hysterically through his screams. Each individual wire was sharp enough to slice through bone as if it were butter, but braid several of them together and they interfered with each other, canceling each other out in a perfect expression of disharmony so that now the thing was only sharp enough to cut through skin and muscle and the light wing bones. Maybe if someone stronger than Fluttercruel was wielding it, it would kill him, but in her hooves it was only going to maim him. He sobbed, and screamed, and laughed brokenly through the gag, because disharmony was sparing his life at a moment when he really, really wanted it not to, which was pretty much par for the course with disharmony and he probably should have seen this coming, but oh please this hurt so much and his bat wing was hanging from the bone in literal ribbons and now she had started in on his pegasus wing and if he couldn't die at least he could black out, couldn't he? Why hadn't he passed out by now?
A piece of his bat wing fell to the floor, the damaged upper bone finally snapping under the whip. He couldn't see the patterns anymore, couldn't feel his own magic, couldn't feel the muscles in his own throat. Couldn't even feel the gag and muzzle anymore. The only way he knew he was still screaming was that it was the only thing he could hear. The world was burning up in white fire, all over his wings and his back, and it was all he could perceive, drowning every other sensation. Every time the lash fell he thought this was it, this was the maximum of pain he could bear, surely he couldn't feel any more pain than this, surely all new sensation would be swallowed by the fiery agony that already existed. And every time the lash fell again he was proven wrong. Some infinities were larger than others. Even with the pain overwhelming him, destroying mind and thought and dissolving the world in excruciating webs of fire, he could still feel more of it every time the lash fell.
In desperation Discord flung his head backward, bending his neck back as far as it would go, hoping the lash would fall against his throat and cut it. Instead it sliced across his face, cutting from one eye, across his muzzled snout, on a diagonal to his cheek, tearing it open. Agony in his eye, and half his vision turning into a red blur. An explosion of blood in his mouth, and cool air against the side of his gums where air shouldn't be unless his mouth was open and teeth bared or unless he was deliberately rearranging his face for fun. The shock and pain finally pushed him over the edge. He felt his head falling sideways, his body tipping in the same direction, felt the side of his body where his wing was mostly gone fall against the floor, and then blessed nothingness.
And then there was something so cold it burned, splashing over his injured face. He was cold, and sick, and in utter agony, and one eye wouldn't open at all. "Discord! Heal yourself!" Fluttershy was shouting, in a panicked voice, as she splashed cold water on his face to rouse him. "Please! Heal yourself now or you'll die!"
It was an order. And now that he was conscious enough to hear and understand it, he had to obey. He felt his magic flowing, not really under his control, though it was always arguable how much control he had over chaos anyway and how much control it had over him. Healing magic was not chaotic, but transformation to an unexpected state was, so what he was actually doing was transforming his injured self into his uninjured self. It didn't feel warm, like he dimly remembered healing magic working back in the days when it still worked on him; it was cold, and he shivered uncontrollably. If he had control of his own magic he'd have warmed himself at the same time, but he couldn't, and after all the blood he'd lost he was so very, very cold.
"I'm sorry," Fluttershy was saying, holding his head in her lap, unbuckling his muzzle. "I'm so sorry, sweetie, I went too far, I never meant to hurt you so badly, I'm so sorry..."
Some part of him still knew it wasn't Fluttershy. But he'd just nearly died in agony, he was still lying in his own blood, and there was a pony hugging him and apologizing to him and she was warm and soft and Discord gave up. She was Fluttershy. For just a little while. Just until he didn't need her to be anymore.
She pulled the muzzle and the gag free. Discord was no longer actually injured, but he was cold and weak and shaken and the memory of pain and fear had burned into him, so he could still feel aching echoes of the pain even now that he'd healed himself. He put his lion limb around the little pegasus and drew her close, buried his snout against her soft fur, and sobbed, as she petted him and stroked his head and told him lies about how she would never hurt him like this again and just for a little while he wanted to believe it. Not forever. He wasn't breaking. He was just pretending. For a little while.