Opposition, 1 AM
Deep breaths. Discord concentrated on breathing slowly and evenly, not hyperventilating, not letting panic take over, as he obeyed Twilight's first and usual order. "Lay down on your back in the circle and spread out your limbs." It hadn't started yet. It hadn't started yet. Don't think about the future. Last night he'd started crying at this point, after enduring torture in the morning, no food he considered remotely edible all day, and an entire day of knowing that this was going to happen to him once night fell, and he'd just been too broken and miserable and weak to stop himself. He wasn't going to break down so easily this time, he promised himself. He was going to make her work for it.
Her magic connected the cuffs and rings on his various limbs to the chains attached to six of the seven posts around the magic circle, and his breath caught. No. Don't think about the future. It hadn't started yet. His tail was pulled out to the edge of the circle, instead of being pulled back behind him as it usually was, and the ring in it was connected directly to a grounding ring on the floor. This was a little unusual, but it wasn't the first time she'd used this particular protocol. His heart felt like it would break his ribcage and he was actually beginning to feel lightheaded with fear. There was a click by his head, and he looked up and to the side. The chain from the post near his head had just connected itself to his collar instead of his tail. That drew another sharp, irregular breath from him. The chains pulled his limbs and his body itself taut, but not yet hard enough to lift him off the ground. His wings ached already from being stretched out like this. Breathe. Deep and even. He couldn't let it make him break down this early. It wasn't even happening yet.
He felt so totally helpless, with every part of his body stretched out tight enough that he could barely move, on the floor, on his back, with Twilight standing over him. How ridiculous. It didn't matter what position he was in, he was always helpless. Stupid to be more afraid when he was exposed like this. Fluttercruel might spread-eagle him like this to rape him or stomp on him or beat him on his belly and between his legs, but Twilight was going to do what she always did and it really didn't matter what position she put him in, the pain was always the same. Still, he had to close his eyes and focus on his breathing.
It was a game he played with himself, since there was nothing else he could control or even affect. How long could he go without screaming? How long could he keep from begging? How quickly could he make himself pass out? There was no prize for beating his previous record and no actual way to tell how long anything was taking, so he really couldn't even figure out how long he was lasting or if it was better or worse than he'd done last time, but the effort of trying to hold out gave him something to do, something to strive for, since he couldn't actually save himself from anything she was going to do.
He looked over at Fluttercruel, pleading with her with his eyes. She cleared her throat. "Um... Twilight? Discord asked if I could stay with him during this session, if that's okay with you?"
"It shouldn't affect anything," Twilight said.
Breathe deeply. Fluttercruel was watching. It wasn't going to save him from much of anything but maybe it would help a little this time, maybe it would make this just a little shorter.
The copper wires descended toward him. He braced himself, his paws clutching at the chains that held them. He knew what came after this; time and time again he'd been here, bound, and the wires had pierced into his limbs and tail, looping and biting in over and over. Then Twilight would attach clamps to his body, sharp enough to bite into his flesh, and then the wires would connect to the clamps, and then those spots would be the first to feel the pulse of white-hot pain before it swept inward to consume all of him.
But this time it didn't happen.
The wires wrapped around his limbs instead, not puncturing his skin and flesh. She took the ends, pushed them under the last loop the wires formed and poked them into him there, which hurt, but she didn't pull them through his body and draw them back out through a different puncture wound like she usually did; they were just sticking into him slightly.
She was varying the pattern. This couldn't be good, could it? She'd already varied it by summoning him early. He looked up at her, not even trying very hard to hide the shock and surprise he felt, but he didn't say anything -- he didn't trust himself to speak without breaking down.
"Today I am going to ask you some questions," she said.
If he could have moved at all he would have sagged with relief. Questions! He could answer questions. If she wanted answers then she wouldn't torture him if he gave her answers and maybe he could get out of this without being hurt very much. Maybe that was why this was off-cycle, because it was an interrogation and not an experiment. And she was hooking him up to the apparatus only partially, and only to make him feel vulnerable so he'd be more frightened and more willing to answer. Well, it'd worked splendidly. He was terrified, and desperately eager to answer anything she might ask in hopes of being spared the pain.
"Is that why I'm here? To answer questions? I can answer questions," he babbled. "Ask me anything. I'll tell you whatever you want to know, you don't have to hurt me, I'm ready to talk. Anything. Please. You don't have to hurt me."
"Very well then," she said. "Where did the letter you gave Spike actually go?"
Oh.
Well, that explained everything. Really, he should have seen this coming.
"I-- I don't know," he said. "It, chaos magic is unpredictable and I had very little of it to spare so I don't even know if it went anywhere. It could have gone into the void for all I know. I don't have any way to find out what happened to it."
She simply looked down at him, coldly, after he finished speaking. Under her pitiless gaze he wanted to start babbling again, to tell her everything he knew. The answer he'd given was honest but very much incomplete, and he had to swallow back nausea.
And then the wires lit up with magic, and he screamed, convulsing.
It lasted only a few seconds, but when it was over he was panting and gasping. If there'd been any wastes left in his body he'd have expelled them. "Tell me where you intended the message to go," Twilight said, her voice and expression unchanging. "And if you attempt to answer a question in a misleading way again, your suffering will last considerably longer than that did."
"I -- I won't, I promise, I'm sorry, please don't--"
"Answer the question, Discord."
"I, I, how did you find out?" He forced the question out in an agonized wail, desperate to buy himself some time and to find out as much as he could about what she already knew, so he could at least try to avoid telling her more than she was going to directly ask him for. "Did Spike tell you?"
"He sent a message to Princess Celestia to confirm her receipt of your document," Twilight said. Inwardly Discord winced. Why hadn't he foreseen that? Well, probably because he was desperate and it had been the only hope he had. "Naturally she was surprised, given that she had received nothing. She informed me this morning. Now answer the question. Where did you intend the message to go?"
If he answered this, if he revealed that he was from a parallel universe and that he'd called on his Twilight Sparkle for help, and then his Twilight actually came... he might be betraying her. She wouldn't know from his letter that the other Twilight was prepared for her arrival. On the other hand, what were the odds that she was even going to show up? Was it worth it, to try to hold out, to endure agony and nausea and what would probably end up being seizures if he refused to answer for long enough, just on the tiny chance that his Twilight was actually coming? He didn't have to answer questions -- the spell on him couldn't compel him to make complex statements any more than it could compel him to perform complex spells, unless he was told in great specificity what to say or do. But he couldn't lie, and this Twilight would torture him if he didn't answer at all...
...who was he fooling? He knew he wouldn't be able to hold out. If he'd ever had the strength to stand up to the kind of torture this Twilight would inflict on him, he'd lost that strength weeks ago. No matter what he resolved this minute, he'd crumple the moment the pain hit. He was better off giving in now, and sparing himself.
"A Twilight Sparkle from a parallel universe," he said, turning his head sideways and laying it against the stone floor in a gesture of defeat, his ears folding down against his head.
"Why?"
"I... I hoped she'd come rescue me. I doubt that she will, but you haven't left me very many other options," he added with a tiny bit of sharpness in his voice.
"Why would any version of myself from any parallel timeline help you?"
There was actually emotion in her voice for once. Disgust, but any emotion was better than the blankness she usually presented him with. "Because she says she's my friend." Even in as dire and horrifying a situation at this, he couldn't help smirking just a tiny bit at the expression on this Twilight's face.
"Discord," Fluttercruel said warningly. "Get that grin off your face. Do you really think now is the appropriate time?"
"No, mistress," he said hastily. He didn't actually have to do anything to stop grinning as she'd told him; the moment he'd heard the tone of her voice, a surge of fear had gone through him and wiped out his smile. "I'm sorry."
"Why would my counterpart claim to be your friend?" Twilight asked, her disgust mixed now with utter bewilderment.
"Maybe because she is. I've never known for certain if she's really my friend or not."
Twilight snorted in frustration. "Is this some sort of parallel timeline where I've turned evil?" she asked in a sarcastic tone. "Straight out of the pages of a comic book or something?"
"No," Discord said, and bit his lip to keep from saying, "That would be this universe." When the urge to provide his opinion had passed enough that he dared speak again, he said, "You're not the difference between the two worlds. I am."
"Consistent with what you claimed to Spike," Twilight murmured. "But implausible all the same." She focused on him again, speaking in a normal tone once more. "Explain yourself. How are you the difference between the two worlds?"
"When we fought the first time, I, I lost to you. You undid my work, you restored your friends and the six of you turned me back to stone. The spell that the me from this world cast on your Elements? That never happened there. I never did that. I'm not even certain how he did it." This wasn't a lie. Discord had a lot of ideas about how his counterpart might have accomplished the task, but while he was denied the use of his own magic to probe the spell, he couldn't know for sure exactly what the other him had done.
"And yet you're not in stone now."
That wasn't actually a question. He fought the urge to volunteer information. A slight touch of nausea churned in his gut, but he knew from experience that the spell wouldn't force him to answer questions that hadn't been asked; it would just make him uncomfortable. The severe nausea only occurred when he avoided answering questions that had been asked.
"Why aren't you?" Fluttercruel asked. "How did you get out?"
"My Princess Celestia. She had the Bearers of the Elements release me."
Twilight face-hooved. "That is so thoroughly implausible I'm going to need to do a spell check."
Terror shot through him. "No, wait, I'm telling the truth! You don't--"
"Be quiet until you're told to speak," Twilight said. Her horn lit up, and his limbs began to burn with pain. It was a much lower intensity than she used in the experiments, but still bad enough that he couldn't stop himself from writhing and whimpering, struggling uselessly against his bonds and squirming like a wounded snake. "I am going to ask some questions. While you are speaking, the pain will cease. Only when you hold your tongue will you feel this pain. You may speak to answer the questions. What is your name?"
"Discord," he gasped, and when he felt that she was telling the truth and the pain eased when he was talking, he added, "Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony, former Grand High Washcloth of Equestria, last of the draconequui, to the best of my knowledge, if you don't count the long-ma, which they--"
"Answer only the questions I ask."
"But then you'll hurt me," he whined. "If I have to keep talking or the pain will start again, then it's not fair for you to tell me not to talk when it's your spell that will hurt me if I don't taaahngh!" The full force of the pain from earlier shot through him again for several seconds.
"I am wholly unconcerned with being fair to you," Twilight said. "You will be silent unless you are answering a question, you will answer only the question that I asked, and if this protocol causes you pain, that's not my problem. Do you understand?"
"Y-yes," he gasped out as the pure agony ended. The lower levels of pain came back as soon as he was finished with the word, but they were far less awful in comparison to what she'd just done.
"It really isn't fair," Fluttercruel pointed out.
"I really don't care," Twilight replied. "Who rules Equestria?"
"Technically speaking both Celestia and Luna, sorry, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, but everyone knows that Luna doesn't really do much of any ruling, since being on the moon for a thousand years doesn't exactly leave one au courant with current legislation and jurisprudence, so honestly it's really just Celestia and she tells Luna she's a co-diarch just to make her happy and not feel left out." He wanted to stretch his answer out even longer but couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't really an answer to a completely different question.
The pain in his limbs started up again. This time he managed not to whimper, but he had to grit his teeth to endure it. "Are you aware that Princess Luna is dead?" Twilight asked, as if she was asking him if he knew the price of bread.
"I -- what? No! No, I didn't, I -- in my world she's not dead, she's just fine, I -- did he kill her, the other--" The five seconds it took for the obedience spell to kick in ended, and Twilight's order not to speak anything except answers to her questions took hold, silencing him. He made a sound halfway between a grunt and a whimper as the pain came back.
"Indirectly," Twilight said. "He turned her to Nightmare Moon again and forced Princess Celestia to have to kill her. What color is Fluttershy's mane?"
"Pink, well, I'm sure Rarity could tell you the exact shade of pink, whether it was salmon pink or nadeshiko pink or orchid pink, I'm not really sure of the gradation precisely, but it's definitely a shade of pink."
"Tell me a lie."
Discord blinked up at her. "What?"
"Tell me something that is not true. This is an order."
Nausea surged. He wasn't capable of speaking words he knew were entirely not true, not under this spell, but he wasn't capable of refusing an order either. "Tell me something that is not true" was maybe vague enough that it wouldn't force him to comply. "I, I, you know the spell you put on me won't allow me to do that, please don't tell me to do that, please--"
Fluttercruel said, "Tell Twilight that she is a seventeen headed gorgon with the wings of a dragonfly."
That was specific enough that he couldn't refuse it. He choked for a moment, nausea overwhelming him as he contemplated telling a lie, and then found himself a way out of the paradox. The nausea eased. "Twilight Sparkle is a seventeen headed gorgon with the wings of a dragonfly, is what my mistress Fluttershy told me to say." He panted, weak with relief at having found a way out of the trap.
"Tell me a lie and do not elaborate to make it no longer a lie," Twilight said. "The pain will intensify until you obey."
"No, please, I can't, please, Twilight, don't, don't do this, please..."
As she'd promised him, the pain slowly grew worse, as well as the nausea as he thought desperately of lies he could tell, only when he tried to say them nothing could come out. A sob caught in his throat. "Twilight, I can't tell you a lie, your spell won't let me, I'm trying, please, I'm trying but I can't, the words won't even come out, please, please, it hurts, please stop, please..."
"You are disobeying an order. Tell me a lie, Discord."
The red-hot pain in his limbs where the wires touched him was joined by agony blossoming in his head, and the objects in the room began to glow with multi-colored coronas around them. "Please, please, I'm going to have a seizure, please stop, I can't, no, please, I'm begging you..." Frantically he searched his mind for some way to satisfy the contradiction. His head hurt badly enough that it was beginning to drown out the pain in his limbs, and the patterns of the world were bleeding together, everything he could see starting to melt like chalk paintings in the rain.
Twilight was pitiless. She wouldn't stop. He looked over at Fluttercruel, hoping against hope that maybe she would save him, but from her intent, hungry expression and the cruel smile on her face, it was obvious that she was enjoying watching him suffer. No help there.
Or was there?
When he squinted, the halos drowned out her expression so he couldn't see it at all. She was a blur of pink and yellow, and he could pretend she was really Fluttershy. Fluttershy, his true friend. Fluttershy, who was the only pony in the universe he could be certain cared about him.
"Fluttershy, I... I love you," he choked out, because if it was his Fluttershy, it was true, and then he could say it.
The pain in his limbs stopped. For a moment the incipient seizure faded, the headache and the halos retreating. And then he saw the look of surprise on Fluttercruel's face, and realized that she thought he was talking to her, which was exactly what he'd meant her (and more importantly Twilight) to think so they'd think he was telling a lie, except he hadn't been telling a lie because he meant his Fluttershy, except he'd been looking at this Fluttershy when he'd said it and he hated her so it was a lie and he'd had to tell a lie to satisfy his orders, but he couldn't tell a lie, but he'd just told a lie...
Every single muscle in his body convulsed wildly, including the ones in his guts. Bile and phlegm and water and blood exploded from his mouth. It was the last physical sensation he felt, as his senses melted into the glorious disorder of pure synesthesia. Pain became bright and clashing colors. He smelled sound and felt light and heard his muscles contracting and expanding arrhythmically as his body thrashed with no more input from his mind whatsoever. It was beautiful, and for a moment, he felt a profound gratitude to the universe at ending his suffering with such a wondrous and incomprehensible blur of chaos. And then there was nothing.
Ice-cold water pouring over his face shocked him back to consciousness.
He gasped and spluttered. Fluttercruel was flapping above him, holding an empty bucket. "...confirmed that the truth spell is holding," Twilight was saying, and when he shook the water out of his eyes and looked at her, he could see she was writing something in a notebook. "While he's capable of telling a lie, it requires extreme duress and it immediately causes vomiting and seizures afterward. Therefore, implausible as it seems, he must be telling the truth." She turned to him. "Are you awake, Discord?"
"Yes," he moaned. She wasn't feeding pain into his limbs anymore, but it didn't matter; every muscle was in agony, after he'd pulled on all of them so hard during his seizure, and the piercings in his tail and wings felt like he'd at least partially torn the flesh they went through. "It hurts, everything hurts, please can this be over? Please, I hurt so much..."
"I haven't yet gotten a sufficient explanation from you," Twilight said. "You said Princess Celestia ordered your release. Why would she do that?"
Discord felt too exhausted to try to drag this out any longer. He'd been answering Twilight's questions as briefly and specifically as possible to avoid betraying useful intelligence she could use against his friends for as long as he could, but he was done. He couldn't push it any further. "She asked my Fluttershy to reform me because she said she had use for my magic. So Fluttershy became my friend. I'd never had a friend before, not really. I... it turned out, I wanted a friend more than I wanted indiscriminate chaos. Fluttershy would be angry with me if I just did whatever I wanted, so... so I had to control it, if I wanted to be her friend. I can't... I don't just spread chaos everywhere like I used to." He looked up at Twilight pleadingly. "I'm reformed. I'm trying to be good now."
Twilight raised an eyebrow. "In your world, do fish raining in Canterlot and ponies stuck on the side of buildings qualify as good?"
Tears welled in his eyes. He closed them tightly so the two mares wouldn't see. Not that they both hadn't seen him cry before, many times, but crying because he was being tortured was different than crying out of genuine guilt and regret. If he'd only done what Fluttershy would have wanted him to do, he would be home, and safe, enjoying the limited chaos she'd allow him to make, instead of being tied up on the floor of an evil alternate Twilight's workroom suffering torture. "No... I said I was trying to be good. It was... it was too hard, I couldn't... I needed chaos, and I knew Fluttershy would be angry with me... so I came to an alternate universe to do it. I was just going to play with you for a few days and then go home..." A sob escaped him. He forced it down. "I know I shouldn't have, I know it was wrong, I just... I wanted it so badly, just a little bit of fun and then go home... I just want to go home, please, I won't cause you any more trouble, please just let me go home..."
"I'd have thought you would have realized by now," Twilight said, looking down at him. "You will never go home again. If you didn't devastate your world as the Discord here did to us, then your Princess Celestia does not need your magic to repair the world nearly as much as we do. And as foolish as they are for trusting you, I cannot in all conscience allow you to return to a world where they permit you free reign, and expect to control you with friendship instead of spells. You are the antithesis of friendship; perhaps you do desire it, but you're not capable of it. As proven by the fact that you went behind your supposed ‘friend's' back to cause chaos here. Since they will not be ruthless enough with you to truly control you, it would be irresponsible for me to ever let you go."
Another sob escaped him. He'd known it wouldn't work, he'd known she would never be willing to let him go, not when she thought she could use him to grant eternal life to ponykind. But hearing the words crumbled a tiny crystal of hope in his heart to dust. "Then just let me die!" he begged. "If you hate me so much, then just kill me!"
"That would be wasteful."
"I'm not going to let you die," Fluttercruel said sharply. "I've lost you once already. This time I can make you obey, I can make you learn how to be obedient and good. And then you can save our world, and I'll never need to hurt you again, and nopony will kill you or turn you to stone or take you away from me. Ever."
He'd known that wouldn't work either. Fluttercruel's words were disturbing him greatly, though. "Mistress... you know I'm not the same one, right? I'm from another universe. The other--"
"Shut up," Fluttercruel ordered. "Of course I know. I've known all along. But I wasn't going to turn down a second chance." She knelt beside him and stroked his head. "I wanted to hurt you so much," she confessed. "Well, him. But it's the same thing. I'd tell him how much I hated him, when we were together, and he'd laugh and tell me he knew. But I never -- after he broke me and made me this, I never wanted to hate him. I had to hate him because he was evil and he was doing evil things, but... but after he changed me I was so much like him, and he was the only one who understood. Even Pinkie doesn't understand. She's just crazy." She laid her head on his chest, carefully avoiding the vomit that stained his coat, and hugged him with her forelimbs. "I hated him and I loved him," she said. "And I know you were lying when you said you loved me, but someday, you will. Someday, I'll break you, and you'll stop wanting to disobey and be evil, and you'll love me. I can't have that from him now, but I can have it from you, and you're the same."
"What did you say in the letter, Discord?" Twilight asked.
His breathing was ragged as he tried not to cry. "I... I told her what you were doing to me and I begged her for help."
"Why not contact your friend, your Fluttershy?"
"I had to send it to Spike. I... I had almost no power, you've taken almost all of it. The only way I could get it to my world at all is to send it between dragons who are cognates. Counterparts in different universes. I let Spike think I wanted it to go to Celestia but it was supposed to go to the other Spike. But I have no way of knowing if he even got it and if he did I don't know if Twilight is going to do anything about it."
"Do you think she will?"
Despair closed its jaws around him. "No," he admitted. "No, I'm almost sure she won't. Why would she? She says she's my friend but she's not. I know it, she knows it, it's not even a secret really, but she won't admit it because she's afraid I won't stay reformed if I don't have friends, even though we all know my only real friend is Fluttershy." He forced back another sob. "She'll probably be happy that I'm here. Then she doesn't have to worry about what I might do anymore and her world is safe from me."
"What was the nature of the work you were doing for Princess Celestia?"
"Closing the dimensional gates. They're porous. Something could get through."
"Is that true of our world as well?"
"Mostly, yes. My counterpart closed up some of them but he left enough open that I was able to find this world easily."
"Is that why you chose this world?"
"No, I chose it because your Discord is dead. I didn't want my counterpart to interfere with me so I wanted a world where my other self was dead."
"How did you expect your Twilight to be able to find you in this world? Does she have the power to cross between dimensions as well, and if so, how did she acquire it?"
"No, I told her... there's a portal out by the Everfree, I figured that her magic would be sufficient to find it and open it." Her alicorn magic. This Twilight would never be able to find the portal. Even if whatever strange power she had added to her own made her as powerful as an alicorn, and Discord found this doubtful, it was the wrong kind of power. Alicorns were tied into the planetary thaumosphere and the Platonic metaconcepts that were the underpinning of magic, each of them representing some principle or force, as Discord himself represented chaos. Only beings with such a connection had the ability to sense meta-magical disruptions. No alicorn could sense the thaumosphere as closely as he could, of course, but if an alicorn got close to an unbound portal and started actively looking for it, she could find it. A unicorn, however powerful, wouldn't have that ability. There was no way this Twilight could find the portal. He thought. He hoped.
"Describe where."
"I can't, I'd find it myself by feeling for it magically. It's near the edge of the Everfree within a few trots of Ponyville, that's all I can tell you. I'm not good at taking measurements or remembering landmarks with precision, I find things by using my magic." He closed his eyes. "It doesn't matter anyway. She's not coming and you're not going to let me go, so it doesn't matter."
"Don't be so sad," Fluttercruel said. "I know life is hard but if you'd just give in and accept that we own you and stop trying to fight, you could be much happier. I could make you very happy, Discord." She kissed his neck, directly above his collar. "You just need to learn to love me, because I love you and I just want you to be good."
He opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling, unmoving. There wasn't any response he wanted to, or dared to, make to that.
"Fluttershy," Twilight said. "Come with me. We need to talk."
"I need to clean him up," Fluttercruel objected. "He threw up before, it's all over him."
"I intended to have Spike do it."
"But we already know he can subvert Spike."
Twilight sighed. "I believe Spike has learned his lesson. But I suspect I know your intention. We need to talk with the others, and then you can come attend to Discord. Clean him up and make sure he's fed; he's growing dangerously thin."
"I know exactly the thing," Fluttershy said. "I'll just need to stop off quickly at home. I can get my cleaning supplies while I'm there."
"Can I sleep?" Discord whimpered. "Please? Is it over?"
Fluttercruel looked at Twilight. "I have all the information I need," Twilight said.
"Okay, good," Fluttercruel said. "If you could take the wires off him, please... but don't untie him. He'll be easier to clean this way, and besides..." She flushed red. "Well, um, I like seeing him like this."
Twilight sighed. "I suppose it's necessary," she said. "Very well, but make sure you clean up after yourself once you're done."
"Oh, of course." She turned to Discord as the wires started peeling away from him. "Yes, sweetie, go ahead and get a little nap. I'll wake you up when it's time to clean you." She smiled broadly at him and winked.
What she intended to do to him after Twilight let her come back was obvious. But it didn't matter. He was never going to get free. He was going to spend the rest of his life as a slave. So what did it matter what she did to him? Discord closed his eyes. It was very uncomfortable, lying on a cold stone floor with his limbs stretched out and his body pulled taut, and his muscles were still in a great deal of pain from the convulsions, but he'd been exhausted beyond belief when he'd first been brought here, and the torture had taken every last erg of energy he had left. All he had to do was close his eyes and let go. Sleep was the only refuge he would ever have from the horror of his current existence, ever again. Let it swallow him, let it give him a few minutes or hours of respite. He could cry with despair later. Right now all he wanted to do was close his eyes and fall into darkness.
Opposition, 2 AM
"This had better be good, Twilight," Applejack grumbled. "Some of us have real work we've gotta do in the mornin'."
"Yes," Rarity yawned. "It's nearly two in the morning, Twilight, surely whatever this is could have waited until the Princess raises the sun, at least?"
"Not like you'd be up then either," Applejack said.
"It must be super duper important if Twilight's making us wake up in the middle of the night for it!" Pinkie said. "Twilight wouldn't just make us wake up early ‘cause she felt like it. Fluttershy might just to be mean and Dashie might for a prank and Applejack might if she thought it would make us too sleepy to think straight and then we'd all agree to something we wouldn't have agreed to do if we were awake--"
"Hay now," Applejack said warningly. "No need to get personal, Pinkie."
"I wouldn't wake you up just to be mean," Fluttershy said. "You're my pony friends. I don't have to be mean to ponies anymore now that I've figured out how to stop."
"You woke up Gummy two weeks ago just to be mean and that woke me up."
"Thought you ate Gummy," Applejack said.
Pinkie giggled. "No way! That was just a prank. I only ate his tail! I'd never eat him all up."
"Oh my Celestia, I hope you didn't try to feed that tail to any ponies," Rarity said. "Your eating habits have only become more disgusting over the years."
Pinkie stuck out her tongue at Rarity. Twilight resisted the urge to face-hoof. What were they all, nine?
"Anyways, Twi, some of us would like to get back to bed, so maybe you could tell us why you called us here? Sometime this week?"
"We're waiting for Rainbow Dash."
"Oh bread me and fry me like a fritter, we will be here all week. Tell you what, I'll just take a nap in your guest room and you can call me when Her Majestic Awesomeness bothers to show her face, which'll probably be Tuesday. If she ain't got some super important autographing session or some bull puckey like that."
"I'm with Applejack," Rarity said. "But since you have to stay up to wait for her anyway, I believe I'll take my nap in your bed."
Twilight's horn flared and grabbed the two mares before they had a chance to trot up the stairs. "We are waiting for Rainbow Dash. She should be here soon."
"I could go get her!" Pinkie said, bouncing up and down. "She always wakes up when I come into the room!"
"Couldn't have anything to do with that prank you pulled where you pretended you were gonna cut her up and make her into cupcakes, could it have?" Applejack snorted.
Pinkie laughed. "The silly filly, she actually believed me. Like I'd put meat into cupcakes! Meat is a savory, cupcakes are sweet! And anyway she's my friend. I only cut up and cook the mean ponies, and I never put them in cupcakes! That'd just be gross!"
"Everything about you is ‘gross'," Rarity said, "and by that I mean grotesque."
"You just don't have any sense of humor, Rari-bearity!" Pinkie giggled. "You gotta see the funny side of things. Things that are gross are funny! Like poop! You can't tell me poop isn't funny."
"I most certainly can. There is nothing funny about poop."
Pinkie giggled. "But it sounds so funny! Especially when you say it!" She imitated Rarity's voice. "Poop poop poop."
"Twilight, is Dash gonna show any time this year or should I make arrangements with Mac that he's gonna need to hire hands to replace me for this year's harvest?"
"I sent Owlowiscious to get her," Twilight said, trying very hard to be patient with her so-called friends. And keep her rage directed where it belonged. Discord had done this to them. Not the one in her workroom, obviously, but he was effectively the same creature. He was the one who deserved her scorn and fury, not her friends. It wasn't their fault what they had become.
"Oh, Twilight, Owlowiscious isn't exactly the fastest bird," Fluttershy said. "I'm sure I could have given you a better candidate."
"Most of the faster birds would be asleep by now."
"Oh, they'll wake up if I tell them to," Fluttershy said. "None of my animal friends want me to be cross with them."
"I bet my gyrocopter could go faster than Owlowiscious," Pinkie said. "You want me to go wake Dashie up?"
"No," Twilight snapped. "We can just wait a few minutes for her. You will not all keel over from exhaustion."
"Speak for yourself," Rarity said. "I very well might. I was up quite late working on an order--"
"--finding ways to cut corners--" Fluttershy murmured.
"Hard work, that," Applejack agreed with Fluttershy in a loud whisper.
Rarity ignored them. "--And I do not appreciate being woken at this unearthly hour of the morning for no particularly good--"
Rainbow Dash flew in the window and skidded to a halt. "Hay," she said, lifting back up to hover upright. Inexplicably she was wearing sunglasses, despite it being pitch black outside.
"Thank you for finally choosing to join us, Rainbow," Twilight said acidly.
"Hay, you girls are lucky I managed to make time," Rainbow said. "It isn't like I don't have better things to do than hang with you all."
"Yeah, we know," Applejack said. "You're just too awesome for us simple mortal ponies."
"I know you're being sarcastic, but that's the Celestia-honest truth there," Rainbow said. "So hay, for once you're being honest again!"
"Yay! We can have an Applejack is being honest again party!" Pinkie said.
"Shut the buck up, Pinkie, before you end up with a lot less teeth to go rotten from all the sugar you eat," Applejack said.
"Um, if everypony would just be quiet, I think Twilight had something important to tell us?" Fluttershy said.
"Well, it's about time, I simply must get back home and get some beauty rest before the morning," Rarity said, "so I hope this can go quickly."
"Not likely," Twilight said. "You will all, in fact, be staying here overnight. We have a situation."
"What kind of a situation are we talkin' about here?" Applejack asked, scowling.
"Last night, Discord tricked Spike into sending a letter for him. I have now obtained Discord's confession; he's confirmed that he does indeed hail from a different universe."
"That all?" Applejack rolled her eyes. "You told us that a few days after we caught him."
"That really doesn't seem to warrant waking us all up, Twilight," Rarity said sternly.
Twilight sighed. "If you would let me finish... He claims that in his timeline, he is ‘friends' with us. Or, specifically at least, with Fluttershy."
Rainbow Dash sniggered. "Yeah, ‘friends'. I'll just bet he is. Friends with benefits, more like it!"
Fluttershy glared at Rainbow Dash. "I'm so sorry you had to whore yourself out to an entire team of pegasi so they'd let you join them. I know that must have been rough on you. All I had to do was whore myself out to the spirit of Chaos to save Equestria, but I'm sure you're a much better whore than me."
Rainbow Dash just removed her sunglasses. "Oh, stuff it, Flutters, we all know you wanted him. Look at you now. I'm pretty sure that training him to be obedient doesn't need for you to fuck him twice a day."
"Guys! If we're all gonna insult each other can we at least make it funny?" Pinkie asked. "'Cause this is like, schoolfilly stuff! We can come up with better ones, I'm sure!"
"I was trying to discuss something serious," Twilight snapped. "So if you are all done being foalish--"
"Not me! I'm foalish all the time!"
"Except when you're eating ponies," Rarity muttered.
"Nope! Foalish then too!"
"I am trying to say that Discord has written to our counterparts and asked them to rescue him."
"Ooh! Ooh! Is this one of those alternate universes where we're evil and we all have mustaches?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Pinkie, a mustache would be a travesty on any of our faces," Rarity said.
Twilight ignored the comments about mustaches. "No. He claims that he has ‘reformed', that he is ‘trying to be good now' because Fluttershy befriended him."
"And you believed him?" Applejack asked skeptically.
"I performed a test on the honesty spell. When ordered to lie, he demonstrated great distress, pleaded with me to release him from the command, and eventually after great effort and under high levels of pain, he came up with something, and then immediately seized. So yes, I believe him, because I've observed for myself that it is enormously difficult for him to lie."
"I wonder if he even was lying," Fluttershy murmured.
Twilight wanted to facehoof. "Fluttershy, he doesn't love you."
"No, I know that, but... what if he loves the other Fluttershy? What if he said it because you would think it was a lie, but it wasn't? After all, we know that his seizures come from contradictory orders that he can't fulfill, but if he tries to lie, well, he can't say something that's completely untrue. So the seizure might have come from failing to fulfill his orders."
"Wait, Discord said he loves somepony? I think I'm gonna barf," Rainbow Dash said.
"Regardless of that, the point is that we are likely to be invaded by our counterparts... who were never corrupted by Discord in the first place, according to him, and therefore still have their original, undamaged Elements of Harmony. This may be a serious threat to us."
"Now wait one minute," Applejack said. "Maybe he really has made friends with Fluttershy and is all ‘reformed' and stuff, though you know I don't really believe that for one minute, but sure, he could be foolin' himself. But why in tarnation would the rest of us care? What makes you think we're gonna come rescue Discord?"
"Firstly, they don't know the full extent of his evil," Twilight said. "Their Princess Luna is still alive. The other us sealed Discord in stone the first time we tried it; he didn't leave a statue-shaped balloon in his place in that world. So all they know of what Discord is capable of is that first day. He never negated their gravity and threatened to let them float into space in front of their little sisters and pets if they didn't remove their Elements and toss them to him. He never corrupted Princess Luna. He never tormented the Changelings. He never started riots in Canterlot that may well have killed my brother's fiancee." She had to take a deep breath to get her emotions back under control. Even with the Diadem, she couldn't achieve emotionless perfection all the time, no matter how hard she tried.
"Well, that's all very well, but he was still a perfect brute, even that first day," Rarity said.
"Secondly, I know myself. Discord doesn't believe his version of me will come to his rescue, because he doesn't believe she is truly his friend. I'm quite certain she's not. But she will come to his rescue, because he is of use to their Princess Celestia, who requested that Fluttershy ‘reform' him with friendship in the first place, apparently so she could use him to seal the borders of their dimension to keep travelers out... presumably, travelers like he himself is in our dimension. No version of me would ever willingly let Princess Celestia down, and if Discord is useful to her, then she is coming... and she's probably bringing the rest of us as well, because--" She swallowed against a sudden surge of grief that the Diadem hadn't protected her from adequately. "--because if they were never corrupted by Discord, then they still have a powerful, true friendship and they'll follow each other into any sort of danger."
"I'm still your friend, Twilight," Applejack said. "You don't need to make it sound like ain't none of us real friends to each other anymore."
Twilight wondered if Applejack believed her own lies. "That isn't the point. The point is that versions of the six of us who were never corrupted are probably on their way here, or will be here soon, to try to rescue Discord. We must prevent this."
"Why?" Rainbow Dash asked. "I mean, he's fun to kick around, don't get me wrong, but why are we sticking our own necks out to make sure he doesn't get dragged back where he came from? It'd mean we don't have to worry about him here anymore."
Twilight wanted to facehoof, but decided it would be insufficiently dignified. "Rainbow, do you actually remember why we're doing all this? Why we didn't just turn him to stone?"
"'Cause it's more fun to buck him in the face if he can feel it?" Rainbow said, grinning.
Note: This chapter has been completed and published. Available at fimfiction.net, fanfiction.net, Archive of Our Own, and my own site.