//------------------------------//
// Act IV, Scene 7: Consider the Following 
// Story: If You Give a Little Love... 
// by Quillamore 
//------------------------------//

The thought of trotting into the Oranges’ mansion without a dire mission in mind was a strangely eerie one.  Yet, the same words that had freed her from Mosely, it seemed, would be the ones that would free her from Midsweet and the others as well. 

They don’t control me.  Not anymore.  That was the sole source of comfort that this entire meeting brought.

Judging from the rumors she’d heard without really believing, the Oranges could barely control themselves anymore, let alone another living being.  Even now, walking into the hastily constructed meeting room, she could see chaos unfolding all around.  Then again, it wasn’t like she expected anything different. 

The Spellshock crew had teamed up with the police officer who’d been attending their practices, himself a former Orange, and he and three others had been sent out to investigate alongside him.  Apparently, he and Scene had been planning this spying mission for weeks, and yet even they were floored when they heard there would be two different meetings. 

The thought of that alone was enough to send Coco back into reality, and into a healthy dose of skepticism.  There were events going on somewhere else in Manehattan that she would know nothing of, ones that might even contradict what was said in this meeting.  Since nopony was really sure whether either meeting was set as a trap or not, they’d chosen to split themselves between them: she and Officer Quartz would be at the mansion, and Scene and Suri would sneak into the Oranges’ usual hotel meeting room at just the right time, in the futile hope of catching a glimpse. 

Coco had practically felt her fur shift from end to end when she heard about the stakeout plans.  Sure, Scene couldn’t have been too happy about having to accompany his nemesis, but the thought of being alone with a cop still gave her the sorts of instinctual fears that her past job had given her.  Strangely enough, though, he hadn’t said anything during the entire taxi ride and remained silent even now, among the indecipherable fracas of the meeting. 

While they took pains not to be noticed, watching in on the pre-meeting events with a careful eye, somepony was already running towards them within five minutes of them being there.  It took Coco a slight moment to recognize the unfamiliar-looking mare, but once she saw the way the mare’s tail gently grazed her cutie mark, she could already feel some of the tenseness lifting off of her. 

“Valencia!” Coco called out.  “I almost didn’t recognize you there!” 

The Orange mare posed with a pride Coco hadn’t seen from her in quite a while.  Her mane was now arranged in a mass of waves, framing her face in much the same way as her past manestyle did.   

“What can I say?  I figured that if we were going to be friends, you shouldn’t always look so scared to see me.  Plus, something tells me the job I got wouldn’t have let me off with the old ‘do, anyway.” 

“So you got one already, then?” 

The words fell straight out of Coco’s mouth, and she almost facehooved when she realized what she was doing.  Here she was, actually treating an Orange mare, the second Pink Lady at that, as if she was some sort of trusted friend.  Chatting with her like she’d seen Rarity do with her fellow designers.    While Valencia had helped her get Babs back, and given valuable information about the Oranges in her spare time, Coco still couldn’t help but think about how much things had changed in the past few months. 

“It’s more of a charity case, really.  Cameo thought my flower arranging skills would be a good way to expand her business.  Apparently, dried flower accessories are in this season.” 

Nervously stroking one end of her mane, Valencia added, “I know Bambi probably talked her into hiring me, but it’s still helping a bit, at least.  I’m not really in her best graces yet, but she’s giving me some good advice about not being such an Orange all the time.  That and, well, at least we’ve had to get over the same stallion together, right?” 

Coco was about to comment on how strange that last remark sounded in a brother-sister context, but Officer Quartz suddenly trotted between the two mares with a strange expression on his face. 

“I presume the meeting’s already started, then?” he muttered, his posture showing that the noise seemed to pierce his ears every bit as much as Coco’s.  “What might you be doing out?” 

While the look on his face was nothing but business, Valencia’s gaze gleamed with something far greater.  There was still quite a bit that Coco didn’t know about the officer, but it was almost as if lightning streamed from the other Orange’s eyes the minute she saw him. 

“Talking with a friend, obviously,” she replied, placing one of her front legs firmly around Coco’s back.  “And a lot of ponies haven’t even shown up yet.  This is just the way it tends to be around here, that’s all.  Not that you would know.” 

She dropped the other front hoof in a scoffing motion and flicked her tail for good measure, her eyes already calculating the best way to get the other mare away from the situation.  Whatever she was about to do was going to be something Coco wouldn’t have dreamed of pulling off around a cop, though, and the challenging looks Valencia kept throwing the stallion’s way already made her fur bristle on end. 

For the time being, Officer Quartz appeared to be more confused than angry.  But, regardless of whether or not Valencia recognized him, she was already in too much trouble as it was without pressing her luck at ticking him off. 

“Don’t you think you’re taking this a little bit too far?” Coco asked in her calmest voice.  “You haven’t exactly been on the best arm of the law these last few months, and he’s already suspicious of what the Oranges are doing here.  My director’s just sent me and him over here to check up on how things are around here, and then we’ll be out of your way.  I know this probably isn’t the best situation for you, but don’t you think it’d be better if you didn’t take the risk?” 

In spite of her attempts at cooling the mare down, Valencia still looked disgusted even watching the stallion.  Realizing he wouldn’t get much news out of the mare, Officer Quartz made a quick gesture to Coco and ran off to somepony else she didn’t recognize. 

“You’d be better off just getting the news from me and taking it to Scene,” Valencia sighed once he left.  “He’s not gonna get anything from that guy.  And besides, it’s not like he can actually do anything.  If he’d been assigned to another case, maybe, but we all know him here.  We’d rather let the family die than be at his mercy.” 

With the way Valencia had been acting throughout the past few weeks, Coco’d almost forgotten about her meaner side.  Sure, she was still as cryptic and weird as she’d been when Coco barely knew anything about the Oranges, but she’d never seen the wealthy mare get so worked up about anypony.  Still, even as Valencia ranted about the intruding stallion, she could still see bits of sad resignation in her eyes. 

“Did he try to shut down your operations before?”  Coco knew there’d been a couple of close calls throughout the years with Valencia’s family, nothing quite so huge as what had happened with Mosely, but still noteworthy in their own ways. 

“Worse.  Once my mother started to get in one of her more rebellious moods again, she decided to try for another foal.  She thought it was too late for my brother and me—“ 

If being in the Orange residence wasn’t jarring in and of itself, the way Valencia had said my brother—disjointed, almost as if she wanted to avoid the subject—only added to the feeling.   

“—so she put everything into this other colt, Tangerine Quartz.  Didn’t even bother putting ‘Orange’ in his name.  She’d made it clear the second he came into the world that the Oranges couldn’t have him.  Unfortunately, with the twisted way things used to work around here, if he wasn’t one of us, and his parents were busy raising him…” 

She barely even had to say anything else—even if her face didn’t come dangerously close to the ground, the other mare still would’ve known.  Coco had been informed from the beginning that Officer Quartz had been a member of the Orange family, but she never dared imagine that a mare like Belladonna—a mare she’d befriended, even—would have done something like this. 

“From that moment on, we were Midsweet’s property,” Valencia continued, confirming Coco’s worst fears.  “They said they wanted to rebel against the Oranges so much, and yet they gave their children away to the worst one just so they could start over.  I got to see him once in a while, and just that in itself was enough to get me thinking that maybe it was worth it.  That maybe she hadn’t considered what the consequences would be.” 

Or that, maybe, Cameo had known about what Belladonna had pulled all along.  That, even if she regretted her actions now, maybe that was why Cameo had called her poisonous all along. 

“I didn’t think I’d mind it as much as I did, really.  But, I mean, he’s certainly not making it any easier now.  He gets to see all of this as part of an investigation, when if the family would’ve been just a little bit stricter on my parents’ plan, he would’ve been in the same place as the rest of us.  From the way he barely even recognized me back there, he probably would’ve just seen me as some other witness to interrogate.  Not his own sister!” 

Coco put her hooves up in the air, silently fearing Valencia would wind herself even more and end up in the Oranges’ bad graces again.  Yet the other mare seemed to stop in her tracks like an unwound doll.  She gave one last tiny huff of annoyance before suddenly going still. 

“Sorry you had to listen to all that,” she muttered, as if she just now realized Coco was there.  “I know it’s not any of his fault, but just seeing him again messed me up like this.” 

“It’s okay.  It gives us one more piece of evidence for the investigation, at least.” 

Even though it looked as if Valencia was about to cry, she still managed to crack at least the tiniest of smiles, glad that her embarrassment served at least some use. 

“He probably wasn’t the best pony for the case, anyway,” Coco spoke again.  “Shouldn’t they have picked a less biased pony for this sort of thing?” 

The other mare simply shook her head. 

“For all intents and purposes, Tangerine was never an Orange.  They probably thought it’d be the same as hiring a non-Orange.  If anything, he’d be biased in the other direction, and he’d never know why we chose to defend the ponies we did in the first place.” 

While Officer Quartz was technically investigating the Orange incidents as a whole, Coco couldn’t help but be reminded of how the evidence might be used in the upcoming Mosely trials.  Something about the idea of a brother using evidence against his own kin, and having no loyalty to him on top of that, unnerved her more than if he would’ve been on Mosely’s side to begin with.  For all she knew, somepony like him could just reduce him to somepony who’d been irredeemable in plain sight, who would never know just how convincing the former Spellshock producer could be when he wanted to. 

“So, um, other than him, what else is there to report?” 

“You mean things that’ve happened within the last couple of years?” answered Valencia, scoffing at how the both of them seemed to be so anchored to the past. 

With a quick sigh, she began, “The Oranges are basically on autopilot right now.  Some of the Ponyville Apples you know have stayed around in Manehattan to try to keep us together and teach us about how real families are run.” 

Before, Coco swore Valencia would’ve sneered at the sheer implication that her family was doing something wrong, but the statement was as blunt as the way she’d barely mentioned Mosely throughout the entire conversation. 

“So they’re the ones running things now, then?” Coco asked. 

“Yes and no.  I felt a lot better about them when they first came in, but even they can’t do everything.  They’ve made some new rules, like making our disowning rule more like theirs and bringing all the formerly abandoned ponies back into our family, but not everypony’s changed.  Not everypony wants them there, and they get heckled for trying to make us different.  Not only that, but just because the disowned Oranges are back…doesn’t necessarily mean they’re accepted.” 

Coco’s stomach turned from the thought, but she forced herself to recall that none of the Oranges she’d seen so far looked familiar.  If Valencia wouldn’t have been there, she would’ve mistaken it for an entirely different family. 

“They don’t even meet together, then?” 

“Normally, the meetings are scheduled at separate times, so Bambi can go to one and come back to us fallen Oranges with notes about what they said.  Of course, with her being the way she is, she complains like crazy about having to sit through two different Orange meetings a week, but she enjoys being the liaison more than she lets on.  Volunteered for it, even. 

“The long and short of it is this: while nopony here outright believes Mosely and Midsweet shouldn’t have been disowned, a lot of them still believe we can save ourselves with our old methods.  Of course, the group here’s a bit more progressive, since they’ve been on the opposite end of the Oranges’ wrath, but things are bad on both sides.  For one thing, the recruits we got from other families?  Most of them left after Midsweet did.  Nowadays, being an Orange is too much of a black eye to bother with, unless you live on the other side of Equestria.” 

Applejack had told Coco a month or so ago that the Apples would be handling things from then on, but even she couldn’t have predicted the splintering that would come as a result.  Hesitantly, she began to realize that nopony outside the Oranges would really be able to change the situation. 

Maybe nopony inside the Oranges could, either. 

“Why did you even recruit from outside, anyway?” wondered Coco, secretly fearing the question could be seen as insensitive. 

Valencia, though she still seemed a bit depressed about what the answer would be, appeared to be perfectly understanding about the question. 

“Most male Oranges have a condition that keeps the family from growing on its own.  Luckily, it can be avoided if enough mares are born into the family, but even that isn’t foalproof.”   

With a tiny pause, almost as if she didn’t want to say it out loud, she whispered, “Like what happens when a member of the Orange family has twins.” 

“Like you,” Coco mumbled, her voice quivering with guilt. 

Even the silence of the room seemed to come in tiny gasps, as if the revelation had shaken even the wind itself. 

“Mosely and I were fraternal, but we still developed the same condition.  As you know, he was able to bypass it once, and Bambi was born healthy.  I…was not so lucky.  One of my foals died just after she was born.  The other even before that.” 

Panic enveloped Coco’s face as she wrapped the other mare around her, barely knowing what else to do.  She’d always assumed that Valencia’s foals had grown, or that she’d simply chosen not to have any.  Not anything like this. 

Coco knew what it was like to see her foal approach death.  She’d never know what it would be like for it to happen so soon, before anything could really begin. 

Just when she was about to cry on Valencia’s haunches, though, the older mare gently pulled Coco off of her and patted her on the head. 

“It was years ago, Coco,” she calmly whispered.  “Long ago for you to have been a filly yourself when it happened.  You don’t need to worry about me.” 

Valencia gave her a few well-natured knocks alongside her leg and forced herself to smile. 

“I wouldn’t have been a good mother to them, anyway.  With the way I was back then, I wouldn’t have seen them as anything more than vessels to keep the Orange family growing.  For all I know, that might’ve been how my mother saw me at first.” 

Tears were still streaming from the non-Orange’s face, to the point where Valencia had to actually tell her to stop crying.  However, as terrible as it might sound, having somepony pity her this much for once was actually kind of nice. 

“If anything, what happens to Oranges like me is worse than losing their children,” she finally confessed after giving Coco enough time to recover.  “Midsweet gave me some grief about it when it first happened, sure, but it didn’t really get bad until Bambi left.” 

She bowed her head, bracing herself for what would come next. 

“Since Bambi was the only foal left from my mother’s line, she blamed me for it.  I hear it happened to other ponies like me when members started to leave, too.  I don’t want to talk about it too much, since you’re already upset, but let me put it this way.  The way she was about to buck your own foal in the face for disobeying her?  It was a ton worse for me.” 

As she’d expected, Coco was now utterly speechless, and sound had been restored to the meeting room.  The moment of peace had been broken, and ponies were bickering once more. 

“I guess that’s my cue to leave,” Valencia told her.  “I’m still technically leader in this smaller group.” 

“Why did you stay?” 

The question had come completely out of the blue, almost as if nopony had bothered to ask it in the first place.  Yet here Coco was, not crying but still nowhere near recovered from the situation, fear and concern streaking into her eyes.   

Concern.  A few months before, Valencia would’ve barely imagined Coco even caring about her.  She couldn’t help but smile at just how the mare in front of her was still so new to the atrocities the Oranges had committed, so much so that she bothered to be shocked by them.  That she still bothered to care. 

“Because Mosely was there.”  Her standard reply.  “Because if I wouldn’t have stayed, I wouldn’t have been able to see him anymore.” 

“And what about now?” 

Coco was already starting to go back towards Tangerine, towards the brother she barely trusted.  But, judging from the way the younger mare looked towards the officer, she didn’t trust him much anymore, either.  With any hope, maybe he wouldn’t get his hooves into this case anymore. 

But Valencia had far more important things at stake.  Discoveries that would make all the pointless meetings and events worthwhile. 

“I want to find out what the first forbidden Orange did.  Nopony’s willing to talk about why he was expelled hundreds of years ago, but I am.  If I find out why they forced him out, then maybe I can clear things up for the Oranges…forever…”