All in all, the experience of interrogating two Oranges at once had left Coco in such a living trance that she barely knew what to expect at work the next day. Everything after the nighttime encounter had been a mix of reflexes, her mind going through its usual motions all on its own without putting much thought into anything or anypony. The utter fatigue of the scenario cut so deep that she didn’t even realize how relieved she was about the peace and quiet in her head until it was too late.
The morning after the storm, she couldn’t even tell that the sun was no longer shining. As she took the road she’d taken so many times before, the only thing stopping her was a single sign, one that illuminated the situation far more than any star could hope to achieve.
ROYALE THEATRE HAS CLOSED DUE TO INCLEMENT LUNAR WEATHER. WE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU AGAIN SOON, AND RESERVE YOUR TICKETS NOW FOR NEXT WEEK’S “LOCK OUR EX-PRODUCER IN THE DINGIEST JAIL CELL POSSIBLE” BENEFIT PERFORMANCE!
THE CREW OF SILVER PHOENIX PRODUCTIONS
In any other moment, this would’ve come across as fairly ordinary stage strangeness, but Coco automatically snagged on two details in particular: the tacked-on promotion at the end and how utterly uncaring the note was about the closing details. Even without his distinct hoofwriting, the note reeked of one of Scene’s memos, and judging from the terrible name the fundraising event had been given, it took all of five seconds to tell it was his handiwork.
That, at least, explained one thing about why the interrogation had been scheduled so late—Celestia and Luna had specifically planned a solar eclipse for that day, and while Babs’ school was putting on special festivities for it, Coco had forgotten just how paranoid Wright was about it. While Scene was normally the more eccentric one out of her two supervisors, the play’s new producer had prattled on about the celestial event ushering in a “new lunar order” for several weeks now. She’d managed to drown it out with continuous Orange news, but today, it was unavoidable.
For the first time in probably a thousand years, the sun was nothing but a ring of darkness, and Coco could practically feel the other theatre ponies going about their business, turning Silver Phoenix into a laughingstock yet again. A few even stopped to remark at her, squeeze more gossip out of her, anything they could for a quick buck.
Completely ignoring the very important pony heading just towards them.
To be fair, Coco had ignored her at first glance, too. After all, she’d only begun to regain focus after last night, and even the most palpable of sights were cloaked in a curtain of uncertainty. Still, against her better judgement, she responded almost as if in a trance, feeling as though she needed to be questioned. Without the sun’s illumination to help her gain her senses, it was just the same as being trapped in another series of interviews, ones that would never end if she had anything to say about it. Getting information, and giving it, was as natural as breathing to her now.
However, to the pony directly behind her, Coco appeared to be little more than a raving lunatic who would’ve willingly let herself stay stuck in the ruckus forever. Though it took a few harsh pokes to her side to notice, the costume designer eventually turned her head towards the other mare, one of the few Oranges she could trust for certain.
“Seriously, Coco?” Bambi blurted out, tilting her sunglasses away from her eyes with a delicate motion. “You don’t need to tell them everything. If they actually paid attention to either of us, they wouldn’t need to ask anything. Would you?”
Even through the glow of her black lenses, her signature look of disapproval was still there, and though Coco hadn’t had much time to spend with her since the latest foalnapping, she could tell that Bambi looked far more serious than she had in months. From the way she eyed them, they might as well have been Mosely himself.
As usual, it only took them a few minutes to disperse from under that glare, something Bambi had likely perfected in her years of staring down some of the worst figures in Manehattan. Like the eclipse itself, Coco could barely look at it for more than a few seconds before cowering in fear and awe, even though it wasn’t necessarily directed at her. With her point proven, Bambi shifted her sunglasses back over her eyes with the wink of a plan perfectly enacted.
“So,” she muttered once she realized Coco wouldn’t respond anytime soon, “you’re off too?”
After seeing the spectacle the other mare had just caused, Coco gave a few silent nods. Somehow, her roommate gave off an entirely different impression on the streets, one that made her feel ever more distant from the reporter.
“Our bosses are so weird,” Bambi scoffed, her hoof scuffing the concrete below her. “They act like they’ve never seen darkness in their lives. But, then again, I guess it’s better than bosses who only ever see darkness, right?”
“Yeah. I almost forgot it was an off day, even.”
Of course, the way Bambi casually referred to her father only brought Coco’s worst doubts back into her head. His voice may not have shown up again yet, but if she kept on like this, he’d catch up to her like he had the night before. As far as she could tell, the only way to get Mosely out of her head was to keep pushing herself towards other things, or better yet, confessing her worries to somepony else. And now that she’d reached an impasse in the Orange investigation, the former was out of question.
Even though she still had barely spent any time with Bambi alone—a fact that she only now realized—and even though Bambi hated Mosely with a fire only Coco could match, she figured that livid stare was the best-case scenario she could imagine on that day.
“Wanna find a better place to watch it?” she asked almost without thinking. “I mean, I know Babs is at school, and it might be kinda awkward that way, but—“
Just as Coco said this, she could feel a playful hoof push her leg down from her mane, where it’d stayed in her usual nervous position.
“’Course it’s not. Meet me in Coach Park in a half hour. I’ve still got some errands to run, so come with your best picnic blanket then, and…”
As usual with things that surprised her, Coco could feel the entire world slow down to the tune of Bambi’s voice and the knowledge that threats far more inevitable than invasive thoughts had always surrounded her.
“…your secrets,” Bambi whispered.
****
With each step she took, Coco realized just how fragile the family system she set up really was. When she first headed for the nearest store that sold eclipse glasses, she figured that Bambi was simply trying to get a rise out of her and take advantage of an already ominous time, but the more Coco thought about it, the more she noticed that the newsmare had a point. The daily briefings they shared were fine and good, but somehow, something had gone missing in the process. She’d started censoring herself, realizing that some information was better kept to her own emotions.
How long has it been like this? she asked herself, placing her bits on the table and doing everything else in autopilot. Just the way Bambi went off on her own investigation yesterday, without telling me…what are we really hiding from each other?
It might’ve been a necessary evil so long ago, back when Mosely outright kept Coco from giving anypony information about her life, but it was a pointless affair now. She’d simply never thought to tell all the facts anymore, not when they could change so easily. And yet, she’d never once hesitated to do the same with Babs now that she’d been dragged into the investigations.
As Coco approached the park, she ran through the events of the past few months as best as she could. Nothing particularly huge had happened since the kidnapping, which Bambi was simply unable to set aside time for. She’d opposed Coco’s decision to join the Oranges, but even then, something about the two of them seemed far closer than it did now. She’d managed to save her from Mosely’s influence, but even that had only been less than a month from when Coco had moved in with her in the first place.
With dismay and eclipse glasses surrounding her eyes, Coco forced herself to face the truth—there was far more to the mare she’d lived with than she knew. But while she would’ve worried herself sick just a few months before, filled herself with constant self-doubt about whether Bambi had ever been anything more to her than a convenient tool, she placed her hooves to the ground with a new determination. She may have been hiding herself from the mare before, but she knew just how to stop it, even if it would be the scariest feeling in the world.
She’d managed to clear out every other voice that would block her way through this situation, and she would pull through this time, even as she felt like she couldn’t hold them off any longer. Her time would have to be now, and with that thought in mind, she trotted into the park like an actress on a stage.
“You’re early,” Bambi muttered as soon as she saw Coco come past. “It’s barely even out yet, see?”
Although Coco sincerely questioned the other mare’s judgement in thinking sunglasses were enough protection to look into an eclipse, she played along and looked through her glasses. Sure enough, the moon had just barely crossed the sun, leaving a large crescent of light in its place. The two objects were destined to converge only for a matter of hours before going back to their places, and Coco couldn’t help but wonder if the Royal Sisters were the same way. Were all families destined to end like this, embracing for tiny convenient moments before wandering away?
“I don’t think it’s good to zone out, even with the glasses on. You can’t hardly see anything other than that sun up there, right?”
In the time it’d taken Coco to philosophize about the fleeting nature of family, Bambi had already put two blankets down and bought drinks from the makeshift snack bar just beside them. Waving a hoof in front of Coco’s face, the other mare began to realize that her companion wasn’t quite into the event, if she hadn’t done so already.
“You sure seem quiet today,” she whispered. “Anything you want to talk about before the big event?”
Normally, that remark annoyed Coco like nothing else—her parents and just about everypony else in her life had asked that when she was a foal, even though she’d gotten to the point where she was quiet almost all the time. Yet unlike those times when she’d been so unable to come up with a response, she was now flooded with too many of them to count. All she could do was pick one and hope that it would take her where she needed to go.
“You were with the Oranges yesterday, weren’t you?” Coco finally asked, even though she knew the answer.
As soon as she heard this, Bambi’s voice dropped to an even tone, partially out of respect for their privacy and partially out of shock. Meanwhile, clouds sped through the sky, and wind whipped through both of their manes.
“Yeah. Even though I knew about it as a filly, I almost didn’t want to believe something like that was possible. Knowing that so many Oranges were abandoned over the years, or passed between parents…”
Even though her motives for conducting her own investigation were unclear, Coco could still tell that Bambi’s feelings for her family were genuine. Rather than the usual way she mocked the Oranges, she spoke with the deepest solemnity imaginable, almost as if she was considering what would’ve happened if she’d had the same fate.
“They say things have changed since the foalnapping,” she continued. “But everything I see just tells me they’re hiding more. I feel like that’s why I’m drawn to them again, even. You ever get that feeling when you just know ponies could be better than they are, and you keep fighting for that?”
“More than you can ever know,” Coco replied, almost losing herself in her emotions. “More than any of us can.”
“Well, that’s how I can stay with the Oranges and beg you not to get caught up with them at the same time. Because every time I look at that family, I want to destroy everything they’ve worked for, but then I look at Valencia and Mom and see all the good they can do. And every time they try to pull me back into their game, I go with them because I want to believe it’s there. I want to believe that someday, they can just go back to being a normal family where everypony doesn’t want to cut everypony else’s heads off. Where they actually love each other enough to stay.”
As the moon’s glow intensified in the sky, Bambi just kept screaming into the wind at a level only Coco could hear. Unlike all those other times she’d done it, though, she showed no sign of breaking into tears or flashbacks and simply stared at the sky with the same intensity she’d given the intruding interviewers earlier that day.
“Because if that isn’t how it’s gonna be, I’m leaving for good this time. If Valencia and I don’t get our heads together soon and tell the Oranges just how ridiculous their ‘fallen member’ shtick really is, these idiots are gonna keep going around in circles for the rest of Equestrian existence! Maybe if they’d just get it through their thick skulls that reform could do more than any publicity campaign put together, we’d have a chance here.”
Just like that, though, the fire in her voice suddenly disappeared, like a speaker stepping down from their podium. After the last sentence had been said, Bambi picked up the glasses yet again, stared at the growing eclipse, and moved on. Meanwhile, Coco’s mouth had dropped straight to the ground.
“What?” Bambi muttered. “Never seen me get that fired up before?”
Coco shook her head frantically, once again not wanting to look the mare in the eye after such a harsh lecture.
“Well, I really wasn’t intending on it,” Babs’ sister admitted as she twirled her ponytail between her hooves. “Really, I just wanted to unwind a bit and ask what was going on with you and everything. But, to be fair, you kinda hit me in the wrong place with that question. The whole thing messes me up thinkin’ about it even now, and I’m willing to bet that’s what’d gotten into you this morning, too.”
“The ‘Mosely was abandoned as a foal’ thing or just general Orange nonsense?”
As unexpectedly as a streak of lightning on a sunny day, Bambi broke out into laughter and left Coco trying to decode what exactly it was that she’d said. The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if she’d become the most easily shocked pony in Equestria lately.
“You’ve gotten pretty sarcastic lately,” Bambi joked, tapping Coco on her front elbow. “I’m impressed.”
Even though her statement was meant in jest, Coco still couldn’t help but blush before letting out a few chuckles of her own.
“Hey, we all deal with this messed-up stuff in different ways. But to answer your question, this got to me a bit more than most things have lately. It’s made me think about possibilities I’ve never even wanted to consider. But really, I shouldn’t let this hamper our day too much.”
Bambi took a deep breath and stretched herself out, barely even noticing that she was rumpling up her blanket. As she leaned back up on her front legs, she gave another sigh of satisfaction and looked at the sky yet again.
“So how about you?” questioned Bambi. “Anything else you need to get out? I didn’t mean to rant just now, but I hear eclipses can help with these sorts of things.”
“How? Ponies haven’t even experienced them in thousands of years.”
“Yeah, but think about it like this: you’ve got your light source coverin’ itself up with darkness as it goes along. Eventually, you can just see a tiny ring of it and nothing else, but the sun always breaks itself out of there. Something’s got to happen to get that light to break out of that darkness, and it’s got to come out in a burst. So that’s why some ponies say they’re going to confess everything to the eclipse. Maybe I just did it without even thinking about it, you know?”
Sure enough, even after all the doubts she’d voiced before, Bambi’s face was nothing but smiles in that moment. As much as Coco would have hated to break that happiness, she couldn’t help but feel that her roommate was going to press her into this confession whether she liked it or not. And, considering how she’d already told Scene and Babs about it, she figured it was only a matter of time.
A single breath. Coco could imagine a single spotlight—or perhaps whatever was left of the sun—beaming down on her.
The eclipse is most beautiful when it breaks through the darkness, she told herself. And I will be, too. I’ll keep telling everypony it takes until I do.
“I know what it’s like to fight for somepony’s real potential,” she said, almost through tears. “Because it’s how I’ve felt about Mosely all along. It wasn’t how I wanted to feel, but sometimes, these questions just pour straight into my head. I want to fight him with everything I have, believe me, but the more I get into the Oranges and their plans…”
“The more you think you could have saved him?” Bambi wondered. “By going back to him or whatever?”
“I know he isn’t going to change, even if Valencia and the others have. But sometimes, I can still hear him in my head, making me if he was really such a terrible pony or just a victim. I’m able to manage them a lot better now, but sometimes, like last night…”
Against all odds, rather than lashing out against Coco, Bambi put her front leg around her and pulled her in closer. Like Cameo, like Scene, like countless other ponies had before.
“You think I’ve never thought like that?” she replied. “As much as I hate him, he’s still my father, and I think everypony has these deals when they get this close to ponies like him. Honestly…I feel like that’s part of the reason I didn’t want you to get close to the Oranges in the first place. I didn’t know what they were going to do to you, or what sorts of things they were going to make you think. And honestly…I wanted you to be different.”
“Why?” Coco spoke. “Because you hate them, or—“
“Because you are exactly the kind of pony I needed back then. For the longest time, I had no clue what to make of you—just some random coming into our piece of a family struck off all kinds of flags for me. I’d been trained not to trust anypony who reached out to Babs or me, because I knew how it ended with the Oranges. And when you went through everything with Mosely, I thought I would’ve saved everypony else the same way if they were in that place. Even afterwards, I was jealous of you for so many nights, and yet somehow…you stopped being such a random to me. I’ve got no clue how any of this works, but somehow, you’re more of family to me than any of those snooty Oranges could ever be. I don’t even know if you’re my sister or cousin or mother or what, but you’re something.”
With an even tighter squeeze, she latched onto Coco and whispered, “Something I don’t want to lose. Not to some stupid messed-up thoughts or anything. So you can talk to me anytime, and that’s not an offer I make to everypony.”
Hearing her voice, Coco could tell that none of this was a promise Bambi took lightly. And, come to think of it, hadn’t everypony responded the same way to this situation? Nopony, whether it was Scene, Bambi, Babs, or Cameo, had ever thought to rebuke her for her doubts, not the way Suri or others would’ve done before. Maybe hiding was a defense mechanism all this time, but as she prepared herself to push through other missions, she would tell herself she wouldn’t need to do it with them.
All along, the harshest pony around her was herself, and if she really wanted to break out of this darkness, that would be the threat she’d have to face.
At that very moment, the sun began to pierce through the moon’s shadow once more, creating a tiny glimmer among a ring of darkness.
“You don’t have to hide anything anymore,” Bambi had said.
Coco could almost hear everypony she had ever loved saying that in unison as she shed her last tear of the day. As she let herself move forward to a new future.