If You Give a Little Love...

by Quillamore


Act IV, Scene 2: Friendly Takeover

Not too far from Bridleway, all of the Orange residences were bustling with activity and uncertainty. Nothing had been formally announced except for the fact that there would be a meeting—a time, a place, and little else. Whoever the hopeless sap of a leader was this time, everything would probably stay exactly the same, with the same insufferable ponies insisting on the same exorbitant expectations.

As easy as it was getting for Valencia to ridicule them, she couldn’t keep herself from remembering that she, not too long ago, was no different. The face that greeted her in the mirror that day was not one she recognized, but it was one that couldn’t have come into being without her being expelled. Were it not for such a drastic measure, she had to tell herself, she’d likely be in the exact same crowd as everypony else.

For most of the morning, she’d found herself staring aimlessly into the mirror, still awed at what she’d done the day before. Everything else about her was exactly the same—even down to the way she held her tail over her cutie mark—other than the mane. It was a random whim, really, like she’d went out for a walk and came back with a magically curled coiffure. Really, mares of her status did similar things all the time, she told herself.

Same length, same in every other way. She didn’t feel the need for a drastic change like those others did. Because when it came down to it, there was one reason and one reason only why she shelled for the makeover package.

Valencia hadn’t really been sure of anything over these past few days. But what she was sure of was this: maybe she didn’t want to be mistaken for Mosely anymore.

She turned away from the mirror and towards a photograph on her dresser with a grace that belied her innermost doubts. Everything that she’d lost during the abandonment meeting she’d regained. She was back with the Oranges, even if she wasn’t their leader or even their business manager anymore. Yet this, the worst punishment, was the one that remained.

As she looked at the stallion in the picture, her shame wasn’t even about the fact that she’d been wrong. It was about how, as much as she’d be returning to family, she’d never really known the pony she’d cherished most.

“Why?” she asked the picture, instinctively cradling it in her arms as if she’d already forgotten everything. “Was hiding that foal so important that you’d resort to something like this? When you did those things, did you ever think of the ponies you’d hurt? Or had you already moved past thinking of others?”

Out of all the times he could have answered her, this was the one he chose not to respond to. Not that she’d particularly expected him to, but it almost would’ve been easier this way. Get the motive out of the way, at least attempt to understand him somehow, and then move on with life. No more of these annoying moral quandaries, or self-doubts, or--

“You’re not the pony I gave up everything for anymore,” she continued, her sharp voice going back to the desperate tone it’d taken all too often these past few days. “With the way other ponies talk about you, I’m not sure if you ever were. But no matter what, Midsweet was wrong when she said what she said back there.”

Her grip on the photo grew ever tighter, shaking the gilded frame it had been encased in. Valencia could only imagine what she’d do if her brother really was there.

“She said you defined everything about Coco’s life. But all along, she was pitting us together so you’d do the same to me. It was like we were one pony all this time. That’s what they say about twins, isn’t it?”

By the time the doorbell rang, Valencia had already lost complete focus. She’d only intended this to be a sort of exercise to channel her emotions, but from what little she could tell, it was becoming more than that. Each layer of bitterness she had, she realized, she’d carried for her entire life without even knowing it.

“…So what do I do now that you’re gone?”

With a quick sigh, everything else went quiet, and Valencia was half-tempted to take the frame and throw it straight across the room. Just as she was about to do this, however, another pony came in, a peach-colored mare with an orange mane.

Slowly, Valencia’s gaze met the other mare’s, who was giving her a strangely approving glance.

"As much as I’d love to watch you do that, the meeting’s in fifteen minutes.”

Though she’d had some vague idea of who the other pony was when she came in, the voice only further confirmed it, and therefore only further embarrassed Valencia. Granted, it was a pony she’d come to know incredibly well, her niece Bambi, but the link between her and Mosely was all too evident in that situation.

“Sorry about that,” she said quickly. “I was just in a weird mood up until now.”

Bambi just tossed her ponytail to the side and gave her a sly grin.

“Trust me, with everything you’ve had to go through these past few days…I can see that. Anyway, it’s good to have you back.”

Strange as it was, Valencia had never truly thought of Bambi as being “gone” to begin with. Sure, the latter had intentionally declared herself a delinquent to the Orange family and everything it represented, but when the younger mare had made that decision, it’d confused Valencia so much that she barely even thought about what it entailed. It’d become just one of a steady stream of ponies she’d been told to forget and remember only at Midsweet’s convenience.

“Are you sure you’re doing okay here, though?” Bambi asked. “When Torte let me in, he said you hadn’t been taking the news well. He even said you’d lost your job back at the Orange place.”

Steadily bringing herself back to Equestria, Valencia prepared herself for a similar string of difficult questions. She’d known her companion to be a rather curious mare, even before her foray into journalism, and she likely wasn’t going to let the situation go with a single response.

“That much, I can handle. After all, with all the influence I’ve built up over the years, I can surely find another job to replace the one I lost. The way I see it, it’s all part of becoming a new mare.”

She puffed her chest about as wide as it could go and fiddled with her new manestyle, taking a quick mocking glance at the photo.

“I may be rejoining them, but only so that the new leader can take tips from me. Point is, they may have rejected me once, but now that I’m getting outside of their standards, I’m going to make a name for myself. I’m not going to be the forbidden Orange’s sister anymore—I’m going to be Valencia—“

A single look at her flank, though, brought back every little doubt she wasn’t able to dispel. Even though the decision to disown her had been rescinded, she couldn’t help but wonder if the issues that caused it had really gone away.

“Orange?” finished Bambi. “Or something else, like Cameo and I did with our names?”

Valencia flicked her tail over her flank, as if doing so would shoo it away like the vermin it was.

“Would I even still be an Orange with this thing?” she scoffed. “I hardly see any other option, at least.”

There was of course, an alternative, however unviable it might be. It would be as easy as covering up her cutie mark then and there and assuming the Oranges would be too dense to focus on two events at the same time. For all she knew, they could have completely ignored the cutie mark revelation to begin with.

With that sole hope in her heart, Valencia reached straight towards her dresser and the stencil that was still there after all this time. Granted, she’d had to replace it her fair share of times throughout the years, but it’d been something that’d stayed with her through everything. One of the few things that had, even.

Its plastic surface glinted in the room’s light, and it seemed to emanate a certain power in and of itself.

Just a few seconds after grabbing it, though, Valencia could already feel Bambi pulling at her tail, the younger mare suddenly realizing what she was about to do.

“You won’t need that for this meeting,” Bambi told her. “I’ve talked to the pony who’s going to help us through this and trust me, things aren’t going to be that way anymore.”

“What makes you think they aren’t? You know how my family is about these things.”

Bambi shot her that quick grin again, a habit of hers that’d grown out of all these years of being away.

“I believe you mean our family. Because this time, I’m not trusting them to be left to their devices again. If they want to bring back the old system, they’ll just have one more pony to go through, then, won’t they?”

It certainly wasn’t the one Valencia had remembered from so many years past, but even looking at her, she could tell that she was shining even brighter now.

Satsuma Orange had been reborn.

****

Any indications Bambi had given of radical change were clouded as soon as the two mares entered the room. Just seeing the velvety walls of the chamber was enough to overwhelm anypony, but for Valencia in particular, it startled in its sameness. She’d practically grown up in this exact room, which was nestled on the highest floor of a particularly glitzy hotel. Yet somehow it made her heart race in ways she didn’t know it could.

Trotting in there again, she almost felt like she was being knocked to the ground again. This time, though, her tail wouldn’t be there to help her, as Bambi had already intertwined it in her own.

“You were never this meddlesome before,” Valencia muttered.

“I guess it comes with being a big sister now. Not to suggest I’m trying to treat you like a foal, though.”

At first, the older Orange stared at her niece skeptically, but somehow, she found her expression morphing into a smile. No matter how things ended up here, a rebel like Bambi probably wouldn’t end up abandoning her like everypony else likely already had.

As silence sunk in, Valencia noticed that they and another mare were the only ones in the room. Since the meeting was going to be short enough to accommodate to ponies who still had to work during the holiday, few had thought about coming there at such an hour. Even when she still went by Satsuma, Bambi had never been the most punctual pony at Orange meetings, and it was then that the whole situation gained a suspicious feel.

She should have known better, she thought, than to think that returning here would come without its consequences.

“Anyway,” Bambi continued as if nothing else had happened, “you won’t need to worry about that mark here. I wasn’t there last time, but I can certainly imagine how harsh it had to have been. Thankfully, this time we have somepony who can set them straight on the matter.”

“You’re sure right about that,” another voice chimed in. “Nopony’s gonna feel like that about their cutie mark no more as long as I’m here.”

She came out of the shadows as if she’d been called from backstage, flicking her tail to Bambi’s in some sort of secret gesture. If the voice hadn’t been so familiar, Valencia almost would have had reason to fear. But even if she wasn’t a threat, she was still very much a pony that wasn’t meant to be there.

Just after the orange mare emerged from the corners of the room, so too did a filly that Valencia hadn’t even noticed, one that looked no older than Babs. They shared a similar cutie mark—not an orange, but an apple.

With everything the two ponies had been through recently, she was almost relieved to see Applejack there. Then, Valencia reminded herself that the Apples had their chance with the Oranges, and they never took it. Even the Apples in Manehattan were far more of Oranges than anything else, Mosely had made sure of that. If they’d ever seen Valencia’s family as anything more than another rival, they would have at least bothered to check up on them like a good ally should. Like they themselves had for a couple of years, before the novelty of the alliance ran dry and everypony continued on with their lives.

“This isn’t your place,” Valencia muttered to the other mare as she regained her aggression. “Especially not if you’ve come here to gloat about our multiple failures as of late.”

Her posture stiffened in the presence of the Apple mare, but the other pony only kept smiling. The filly next to her seemed at least a little nervous, but even that didn’t dull her courage one ounce.

“Well, it is now,” Applejack replied. “After hearin’ about everythin’ that’s been going on over here, we Apples decided to pitch in and help. For the time bein’, the alliance is back up and running, and so some of our members will be watchin’ in on y’all these next few weeks.”

“Who even approved of this? Some turncoat who wants you guys to take us over? I know how arrangements like this go: you’re the number one fruit producer in Equestria, and that’s given you the idea that you can quash your opponents just like that.”

Valencia didn’t even have anything against the mare herself, and she feared that much was coming out in her conversation. Even as she tried to hold her confidence as much as she could, the skeptical glances from everypony else told a different story. Deep down, she was just a common pony with an ordinary cutie mark who’d managed to be born an Orange, who played at being a leader to compensate for all that.

“Never mind,” she sighed after a few moments. “Do what you want with us. You sure don’t have me to stop you anymore.”

She stepped towards her new place at the Orange table, having to remind herself that the center seat was no longer for her. Talking to the enemy certainly wouldn’t do anything to make her go away, so all she could do was at least hope she didn’t screw up too much about what made her family great.

That is, considering what she’d learned about Mosely recently, assuming it was ever great to begin with. If everything about him was a lie, then were all the traditions, meetings, and rivalries the same way?

A few more Oranges started to file in, and it looked as though they were still without a leader. If Applejack was really going to be the one to start the meeting, Valencia thought to herself, she should at least be making preparations by now. But instead, the other pony stayed by her side even as she tried to turn her attention towards something else.

“If you wouldn’t have stormed off back there, I’d have told you that’s not what we intend in the slightest,” Applejack told her. “We don’t even want a merger between the two of us. The Oranges are their own family, and the Apples are their own family. You just need to find somethin’ a little different to define yourselves.”

“And that’s really it?” Valencia questioned. “No other ulterior motives or anything?”

Applejack gave no response, as she was already off to set up the last few pieces she would need for the meeting, but Valencia already knew. The Apples may have been the number one family, but they were also incredibly simple, so much so that it almost seemed like an act. Then again, when your enemy’s leader happened to be the literal Element of Honesty incarnate, somehow you got the feeling shady business tactics and outright sabotage would be below them.

A half-hour went by, and the center seat was still empty. Last time it’d been like that, Valencia had been physically restrained by her own family members to keep herself from sitting there. And really, up until that moment, she hadn’t even wanted the power that much. But now that she knew how her brother and grandmother had been corrupted by the position, something about it seemed to call to her, as if a straight-laced pony like her could actually change anything.

Nopony stepped up to claim the position, so Valencia hesitantly stepped forward, creeping towards the ornate scarlet chair. She started off by touching it as if it would break beneath her hooves and finally eased her flank onto it, feeling none the less nervous for doing so.

Honestly, she’d expected at least somepony to pipe in about how she shouldn’t have been there, and she wasn’t disappointed in that regard. It was enough to send some older Orange into what was likely meant to be a rambling rant, but the attempt was shut down almost as soon as it was uttered.

“Do we even have anypony else who’d qualify?” a younger mare replied in a bored voice. “If putting her back makes this long-winded thing go any shorter, I’m all for it.”

Far from the most encouraging thing she could have heard, but somehow, that was to be expected. Bambi, on the other hoof, gave her an approving glance, and with that, Valencia spent all of thirty seconds planning her opening speech.

“I’d like to announce,” she began, “that I’ve never been more nervous in my entire life. For one, I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. Literally, because somepony chose not to brief me on anything, and figuratively, because these past few days have been a total existential crisis for me. And by the time I got around to wondering how I’m going to help this family change their ways and not have bimonthly scandals, I realized that I have no idea how I’m even going to change myself. So let’s start with what we do know.”

Valencia had to practically will herself to sound as unbiased as possible about the jarring events, but judging from the looks on the other Oranges’ faces, they felt all too similar. Many still had expressions of concerned shock, while others were annoyed at having been reminded of their family’s wrongdoings one too many times. In actuality, though, she kept the recap going as long as she could, because everything else from there was still a blank.

Fortunately, Applejack seemed to have planned for this, too. After Valencia gave her complete account, the country pony strode towards the center of the room, placing herself directly adjacent to the Orange leader’s spot.

“I know all of you are proud of what you’ve made here,” she spoke. “And I’m hardly stoppin’ you from bein’ proud of that again someday. But until further notice, the Orange family is under temporary Apple jurisdiction. This ain’t meant as a way to run yours out of business, but as a safety net to keep you from gettin’ that far. The lot of us have been runnin’ the numbers with the Orange business division, and they aren’t lookin’ good at all.”

Scattered whispers of concern filled the air, ones that hadn’t been there even when the news of the foalnapping came up. Several Oranges stared at one another in confusion, wondering whether they should trust the competitor’s revelation.

“The foalnapping hit the news like nothin’ before,” Applejack continued. “Long story short, if you think Mosely did damage on your rep, Midsweet hit it even more. As of this mornin’, seven major sellers have withdrawn their support. Add that to the three from last month and you’re in far more danger than just not bein’ number one.”

While it was strange to see the Ponyville mare discuss business, it was even more jarring to see the sheer level of uncertainty in the Orange room. With a few sentences, every last bit of cocky exceptionalism inside had been torn to pieces. Even if the Apples wouldn’t have been there to take over, none of them would’ve even had the power to come up with a plan of attack in this moment of despair.

Just hearing these words was enough for many to forget who was saying them. Compared to potential bankruptcy, a petty rivalry was little more than an amateur distraction.

“Assuming these withdrawals are anything like the last ones,” Valencia surmised, “they were likely carried out as a means of protest. Orange growers on other sides of Equestria are finding themselves with massive profits, meaning that if we can show everypony that we’ve changed, we might be able to save ourselves.”

“Exactly,” Applejack replied. “It’s gonna take a lot more than just a few good deeds around town, though. Now that everypony knows what really goes on behind these walls, nothin’ can be like it was before. Thankfully, our families planned for somethin’ like this when we joined together. Oranges have been participating in Apple events and reunions for quite some time, providin’ feedback and the like. This is our way of returning the favor: by helping you all create somethin’ new.”

If anypony else would have said these things, it would’ve sounded almost sinister. For a few ponies, it even did. But for those as jarred by the events as Valencia had been, it was at least better than anything they could come up with on their own.

Even then, though, opposition still came. Multiple ponies became emboldened to question her, and yet Applejack addressed them with the ultimate mercy. More than anything, she clarified that the Apples would only participate in meetings, that they would not be spying outside their doors.

Valencia couldn’t help but wonder if all their willingness was for public relations, and judging from the skeptical glances Bambi gave, she was the same way. But somehow, even that was fine. Even if she’d opposed her earlier, Valencia still couldn’t shake the fact that not too long ago, the Apple and the Orange had worked together for a common cause.

The last bit of doubt she had within her dissipated as she walked out of the room, knowing that this was her one path to safety. This was the only way she had to keep her family from turning against her, in her mind, at least.

But as she saw the yellow filly dart towards her with a surprisingly hopeful voice, she realized that this change could have another benefit.

“I’ve heard about you. You’re havin’ trouble with your cutie mark, right? I’m a Cutie Mark Crusader, and you can leave it to me!”

The second phase of the foalnapping rescue, and of Valencia Orange’s life, had begun.