In the hushed atmosphere that had emerged from the previously noise-filled stage, a mare awaited her once-fated husband. From what little the audience knew of her, they weren’t quite sure they agreed with her denial of madness, but they were sure of one thing: she sure wasn’t a princess. Whatever prince would come to save her would only end up angering her more. A possible stallion to fill that role had shown up a few moments before, but he’d been far too cowardly, fleeing the stage at the first indication of his wrongdoings.
But he would return. Among all the risks of the situation that Cameo had thought of, Mosely ignoring her would not be one of them. Until then, she would bide her time, vowing to only give her full story upon his reappearance. She owed him that much for all the spectacle she’d put into this.
The scene seemed straightforward enough looking at it from the outside: somepony had dared to sabotage a Stealer-Orange show on its opening performance. Sure, the pony in question had halted her mission unexpectedly, but that was the furthest thing on anypony’s minds. Of much greater concern was how recognizable the intruder was and how the once-radiant Cameo Orange had fallen to such a state.
Babs couldn’t take her eyes off the whole affair, still innocent to most of its context but able to piece together what was truly important. Somehow or another, the mare on stage, the one who had obstructed everything her adoptive mother had worked for, was her flesh and blood. Not just that, but every bit as much her mother as Coco was then.
“So you think she’s for real?” she could hear Apple Bloom whispering a few seats to the left of her.
“Of course she is,” Applejack replied. “I can’t see how she isn’t. You’ve seen her at reunions and all.”
“Yeah, but if Babs’ mother is still alive, then I can’t see why in Equestria she’d leave her behind like that. If she would’ve gotten involved back then, maybe Babs wouldn’t have had to have gone through all of that.”
“Not everypony can do those sorts of things, and sometimes there are just ponies you can’t save. Maybe this is just her way of makin’ up for everything. Anyway, we can’t afford to be too judgmental here. The last thing we want is to have to turn another Apple away if we don’t have to.”
“Think what you want, but I still don’t trust her,” Apple Bloom muttered. “I mean, with the way Granny’s always been about the Oranges, you’d think it would’ve been a bigger deal. And when we met Babs in Ponyville that one time, she even said she’d never want to live with them, that her side of the family hates them just as much as ours does.”
Seeing the pony in question as silent as she’d ever been, the two Apple sisters realized that perhaps trying to discuss sensitive family matters like this in front of her wasn’t quite the best way to handle things.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” said Apple Bloom as she pulled closer to her cousin. “It’s just that somethin’ about this whole thing doesn’t seem right to me.”
“If it helps any, you’re not the only one suspicious of all this,” Babs admitted. “I don’t remember much about my mama, but that ain’t her. I’ve never really been around any highfalutin ponies like her, at least not that I remember. When I look at her, all I see is somepony from reunions, and everythin’ else is a blank. And she’s pickin’ on Momo on top of that. I know he’s bad now, but I can’t watch much more of this. I still trust him a ton more than I trust her.”
“So you don’t know her, but you know my uncle? I never really got to know either of ‘em.”
“Sure. He was the guy I lived with before Coco. I lasted a couple months with him before that happened. Don’t know anything about why I ended up with him except that he’s Bambi’s dad and all, but it was nice back then. If it was just that, I’d be rootin’ for him all the way. But Bambi’s been telling me he hasn’t been the best to Coco, and I haven’t known how to feel about him lately.”
Silence emanated between the two fillies’ seats, unable to fully be removed, not even when Babs opened her mouth again.
“I just don’t get it. Why do the two ponies who love me most have to be enemies?”
Listening in on the conversation, Applejack strained every part of her thoughts just to hold it all in. That the problem had never been that they both held too much love for her, but that one lacked it entirely. That, if Cameo really was Babs’ mother, that she was already siding with the pony who’d hurt her most over the one who’d brought her into the world.
All she, and anypony else, could do to keep their sanity was to listen in wait for the story. Sure, it would be one that would shake the whole room, and certainly that would leave shrapnel for months or perhaps even years.
But even if they could never fully clean it up, they still knew it was one that had been avoided for too long, and hence one that needed to be told to make things right again.
****
In the corner of another room, Coco Pommel lay in wait for a moment that would never come to pass. She’d been pulled into this place halfway through the first act, unable to watch her own show unfold. To the other ponies of the play, those who didn’t know any better, she would have plenty of opportunities to see just that. It had already been scheduled for near-nightly showings, which would all end up becoming interchangeable in the first place. She would have no shortage of time to play at being a costume designer for the next couple of years.
But, perhaps too late, she realized that was no longer her role here, at least not to anypony else. As she was put through the motions that any of the other actresses would have to go through to look presentable on stage, she looked in the mirror and saw only another prop. Something for Mosely to parade around on stage and pretend to care about. If she didn’t figure out something to stop it soon, the pony she truly wanted to be would become just another piece of the gossip.
If she had to pinpoint when her nerves about the ceremony really returned, it would have to have been when she saw the dress that’d been laid out for her. Looking at it, she could already tell that it was worth more than any salary she’d ever had. Even when she took in all the other details surrounding it—its dusky teal lace, the exquisite sapphires lining the belt, the collar that would nearly strangle her—that simple fact never left her mind.
She didn’t know whose handicraft this was, and she likely never would. What mattered is that it wasn’t hers, and even with the way it complemented her mane, nothing could make it that way. If she were really being honored for her designs, shouldn’t she be wearing one of her own pieces? Would the ponies in the audience even know that she had never seen this dress before tonight?
As a final act of rebellion, she had headed straight towards the spare costumes, hoping to stuff herself into one of them before anypony could notice. However, the stylists in the room were almost all too intent on making sure she stayed put.
For all the effort that had been put into polishing her up like the trophy she was all-too-quickly becoming, Mosely seemed to be taking his sweet time when it came to the showcase itself. Having counted the minutes since the last round of applause, she’d calculated that intermission was just about to begin. Yet nopony had come over to drag her onstage. Had he been lying about the whole thing all along just to make sure she didn’t try any funny business tonight?
Coco certainly wouldn’t put it past him at this point. But all she could do in this moment was to let the stylists make their last few touches on her mane and prepare herself for anything that could possibly happen. If on the off chance Mosely really had planned to go through with the announcement, then deep down, she knew only something cataclysmic could keep him from doing just that.
Four minutes into intermission, she finally heard a knock at her door and almost bolted straight out of her chair in fearful anticipation, violently pulling the beautician towards the wall. She didn’t even bother to check who it was, because she’d already been over this several times while she was holed up in this place. One of the stylist interns would come over to escort her up to the stage, Mosely would take it from there, and in his own words, Coco would ‘become a star.’
Stealing a final glance at the mirror to make sure every meticulous detail of the ensemble was in place, she opened the door to find an entirely different figure. He was probably the most sharply-dressed stallion in the entire theatre, his green mane slicked back in an especially suave style for tonight, a red-and-black tuxedo covering his entire body. In fact, the only thing that didn’t match this image was his face. In spite of his attempts to look as confident and collected as usual, his eyes in particular were blue spheres of fear.
“Coco,” Mosely began, his voice a clipped and urgent shadow of itself, “you need to get out there. Right. This. Second.”
“I still need a few more minutes,” she replied, silently dreading just what he could do to her for defying him in this fragile state. “They say there’s still one more braid that needs to go on this side, and—“
“Change of plans. Nopony will care if your mane isn’t perfectly symmetrical at this point. The sooner we can distract the audience, the sooner everypony can all forget this intermission ever happened.”
To the other stylists’ protestations and Coco’s expectations, Mosely whisked her off towards the performance area before anypony could stop him.
“What’s even going on back there?” she asked. “I’m not hearing anypony back there.”
“That’s good,” he muttered. “That means I was able to distract her for a while. She insisted on my being there to witness everything, so she doesn’t see any point in acting up when I’m not around. If we get on stage quick enough, the security department should take care of the rest.”
“Who are you even talking about?”
“The mare who crashed your dedication session. Pink Lady. The one who’s been trying to ruin us all along. Whatever you want to call her. Just don’t call her my ex-wife.”
“I still don’t think I—“
“You don’t need to get it. The point is that she’ll catch us for sure if we go through backstage. That’s where she probably expected me to hide. Front door’s that way.”
Before Coco could utter a single comment about how she knew the theatre just as well as he did, she noticed a few ordinary ponies just outside the lobby, clearly trying to make conversation with Mosely.
“Hey, aren’t you the guy that mare keeps going off about in there?” one of them muttered.
“She’s still at it?” Mosely asked them without thinking. “I thought I threw her off.”
“Sorry, man, but nothing could keep that mare off her stage. Just like any good actress out there.”
“You should consider yourself lucky, though,” his companion replied. “The reviewers are definitely going to be all over your show now that it’s the famous gig that got crashed opening night. It’s like they say: no news is bad news, right?”
“Though she has been biding her time up until now. Just throwing out threats of what you’ve done with no evidence. Figure she’ll get the hard stuff out once you show up again.”
Before either of the two stallions could respond any more, Mosely had already pulled himself and Coco in the opposite direction with a renewed intensity.
“Let me just say one thing to all this,” he whispered to her. “No matter what ponies might say about me, I’ll never go against you so blatantly. There’s a reason I’ve kept your secrets, and that’s because I don’t stoop to those levels.”
Those were the last words she heard him say to her before he pulled out the main key, unlocking the auditorium doors for a tiny sliver of time. Members of the audience, seeing the light just outside, scrambled towards the exit, but it was already locked just like before. If Cameo and Mosely were to wage their battle, they weren’t about to let anypony escape in the process. Everything about it was now unavoidable.
Only a single pony was able to trot through the crack before it was filled once more. All else would repeat Babs’ fate, abandoned behind closed doors, crying for escape but never receiving it.
****
“It’s about time you showed your face around here again,” Cameo began once more after an all-too-long pause. “Don’t worry, I saved the story for you. This one always was your favorite, after all.”
“I think that’s quite enough from you,” Mosely replied, trying with all his might to hide the utter desperation in his voice. Seeing all the ponies watching what could be his ultimate downfall and likely already thinking of who they’d spread the secret to after the show was almost too much, though, even for a seasoned liar like him.
“Is that any way to talk to your ex-wife? Last I heard from you, you wouldn’t stop begging me to take you back. Though personally, I have to say that I don’t mind the change at all.”
“You told me you weren’t my Cameo anymore, so I’m not about to treat you like that now. Tonight, you’re no different than anypony else who gets in between me and my plays.”
“Glad to hear that you listened for once. Besides, from the looks of it, it seems like you’ve already found a replacement for me. After all, I’d know that expression anywhere.”
Coco’s hopes of not being noticed by the clearly hostile former flame were dashed before they really had a chance to form. She closed her eyes as tightly as they could go, willing herself to another place. It didn’t matter where she would end up, as she didn’t have to see either of them ever again.
But she was no unicorn, and she’d certainly read enough romance novels to know where this was going. Even if she didn’t really love Mosely, the mistake would be all too easy to make.
Even with her eyes closed, she could still feel Cameo’s breath close to her, more than likely sizing her up, maybe even thinking of ways she could hide both their bodies after the show.
Finally opening her eyes, dreading what she would see, Coco was as surprised as anypony else to see a note of softness within her competitor’s eyes. She wouldn’t quite go so far as to call it happiness, but it was certainly enough to drastically contrast with the gaze she normally gave Mosely.
“Sit tight,” Cameo whispered to her just outside Mosely’s earshot, “and I’ll get you out of all this, too. I have no idea how you got mixed up with him, but I won’t stand for it.”
“But you don’t even know me,” Coco replied. “At most, you’ve just watched me from afar.”
“I haven’t even done that. But I still want to believe you’re better than him. So unless I’m presented with any other evidence to the contrary, I fully intend on saving you, too. Nopony deserves a stallion like him.”
A sense of urgency ignited Cameo’s gaze, as if she’d meant to tell Coco much more than words would allow. But before she could form these thoughts, Mosely pushed her away with a violent hatred she would’ve never expected from the stallion who’d spent most of their first date waxing poetic about his ex-wife.
Had those thoughts of her really left Mosely for good? Or had the possibility of being exposed broken down any sense of reason he once possessed?
Just then, the answer came to her in possibly the most unexpected way:
“You can taint my reputation all you want,” Mosely asserted, “but if you dare convert my Coco to your side, I won’t keep holding back. I’ll only say it once: get away from her and put the microphone down or else you’ll have Tartarus to pay.”
“Sure I will,” Cameo replied. “But first, let me just ask you a question: if you’re fawning all over her so much, then why haven’t I ever seen her around our parts of town?”
“You left high society before she could make her debut there. Simple as that.”
“Yes, but I still stop by the parties every once in a while. I’m still up on who’s who in this city, and I’ve still never seen her before in my life.”
Once more, any hopes Coco had of Cameo being her ally in this matter disappeared into nothingness. With the way the other mare seemed to trick her into thinking she was on her side, Coco almost thought the two deserved each other for a slight moment.
All that would soon fade when the two Oranges continued their verbal battle.
“And here I thought you never cared about class in this city,” Mosely observed. “You sure didn’t stop yourself from making friends with everypony else back then.”
“Oh, I still don’t care about that rubbish,” countered Cameo, “but point is, you should. Ten years ago, when I pulled the same thing with my second husband, you certainly did. I wonder what the you from back then would have to say about that.”
“He was different and you know it. For all you knew, he could’ve conned you out of everything you had. Sure wouldn’t put it past his family.”
“And yet he didn’t, unlike you. So tell me again how you can take an ordinary mare like her and not call yourself a hypocrite.”
“Because she isn’t an ordinary mare. Not anymore, not with me around. As long as she has me, nopony will ever mistake her for anything other than who she was always meant to be. She was able to shed all the common parts of her and become a true Orange, the same test that your Flynn would never be able to pass.”
“You had it rigged against him. You knew it, and I knew it. The only pony who didn’t was the one that ended up getting burnt by it the most. For all I know, it’s probably the same case repeating itself here. But I don’t think I’ll be gracing you with any more responses any time soon. Answering you is only going to take away from what I really came here to do.”
Looking to the audience, Cameo confirmed what she’d already suspected: the audience was quickly growing tired of a couple’s quarrel taking up their precious time. Her credibility was ebbing away with every minute she spent on such petty things. Everypony in the room was already fidgeting, likely internally complaining at how quickly such a spectacle had faded into monotony.
If there was one thing she knew how to do in that moment, it was bringing their attention back where it counted. It was something that could only come from spinning a saga even more complex than the one that was supposed to come back on any moment now. And she knew just the right one.
Seeing security guards already heading towards her, she feared she may have squandered her chance to tell it. She could just barely see the director out of the corner of her eye, pointing to her as if to alert them of the obvious target. However, what little she could make out of what he was saying was enough to let her know she might just have another chance.
Intersecting lights crossed her body once more, drawing attention to her rather than driving her away. She was no longer an interloper, but a welcomed guest performer. In the midst of all this, as security forces parted, Scene Stealer took the stage once more.
“You may not believe her,” he spoke into the headset. “You certainly won’t want to. But I have a feeling you’ll believe it from the mouth of his most trusted partner. This is a story that’s been kept from Manehattan for far too long and tonight, it’s the one that we’re about to tell. The uncensored story of how this play was really made.”
As the mysterious mare prepared to spin her tale, Coco still wasn’t sure whether to trust her or not. But she knew one thing for sure as her heart began to race: she could certainly trust Scene.
And if he was going to take Cameo’s side, she would do everything in her power to back him up.
“This play began with a lost love,” Cameo began once more. “Two, to be more accurate; one left through death and the other through simple loss of interest. I won’t bother you too much with the second one, since it goes like too many others out there. In that one, a stallion fell head-over-heels with a mare, only for it to not be enough. The pony he really loved was one that he created in his head, and no matter how much he molded her, she can never fit that one image. She didn’t realize how much he hurt her, but she still felt the pressure and, in a fit of rage, left the relationship. That was over ten years ago, but sometimes even now, the mare still regrets her decision, because she still yearns for love.
“That was how I was, and how I still am. When I decided to leave Mosely, I didn’t quite know what I was doing, and I became a changeling pony, doing all I could in search of some love that could fill the void. Not in the literal sense, rest assured, but all else essentially applied then. It didn’t matter what kind of love it was or who it came from, as long as it was there to penetrate my heart. Ideally, I would’ve gone straight for the sort that came from my family and friends, and perhaps none of this would’ve happened if I had. But they were all too sadly unavailable, for they were also one of the major prices I had to pay for being with Mosely. To abide by his standards, I had to move away from theirs, which they took to mean that I had abandoned them. I later found that they had grown to hate me and honestly, who could blame them for seeing it that way? That decision was as much mine as it was his, after all.”
At hearing this, a single mare bolted out of her seat, but not to leave the area. Rather, she stayed exactly where she had always been, merely standing in her place as if such a thing would help her take everything in.
“Granny, what’re you doin’?” Applejack demanded almost a bit too loudly. “Get back in your seat; you’re blockin’ everypony behind us.”
“Shush,” the elderly mare responded. “I wanna hear the rest of this. Haven’t heard Cam’s voice in so long…”
“But you see her at reunions all the time.”
“Not like this. It’s like the way you were with that singer friend of yers. If you always saw her like she’d been on stage that one time, it wouldn’t be the same. Cam had always been my pride and joy when she was a filly, but when she married that stallion, there was always somethin’ empty ‘bout her. Not anymore. Now it feels just like it was when she was with yer pa.”
“So you’re sayin’ you’re believing all this, too?” Apple Bloom piped in. Granny Smith placed her hoof to her lips at this and went back to listening to the one pony she’d thought she’d lost all this time.
“—so I lived alone for a while, still craving the sort of love I’d once gotten from my ex-husband, when a stallion suddenly arrived at my door one day,” Cameo continued. “From the sorts of clothes he wore, I swore he was just an ordinary salespony at first, and I didn’t think anything of our first meeting. He’d told me that Mosely had brought him over to try to win me back to his side, and that he was apparently some sort of perfumer. Even now, I think he had an odd plan in mind—commission some beautician off the street to make me something that would charm me back to his side. It certainly wasn’t how I would’ve gone about it, but that’s as far from the point as I mean to go.
“What mattered is was that, if anything, it had the opposite effect on me. I wasn’t ready to admit how much I still needed Mosely by my side, so I decided to go along with it for the time being. At first, the questions the other stallion asked were simple, and I could tell he was just trying to finish a job that would likely reward him richly. But, in my fragile state, I began to cling to him just as much as I once had with Mosely. About a month into our daily meetings, I realized that I never once got his name, he was so dedicated to pleasing his employer. When I asked him, he told me just to call him Flynn. Never wanted to give any other name, but that was enough for me. I figured there was a good enough reason for not wanting to disclose the rest.
“If it’d been anypony else keeping these secrets from me, I wouldn’t have stood for it, but with him, it was just different. No matter what I did or how I responded, he still treated me the same way. I can’t remember him ever going against me, and my more skeptical side thought that was just part of the job he was trying to do. And yet what scared me even more than that thought was that someday, if I were to ever go back to Mosely, I would never be able to see Flynn again. Somehow, the feeling of losing him was even worse than the pain that’d eaten inside me when I’d left the first pony I loved.
“In retrospect, perhaps I should’ve realized that he was getting just as distracted from his assignment as I was from why he’d originally come in the first place. So when he told me once that he was about to move onto another offer, I asked him if he would still want to meet me after work. I’d prepared myself for failure, but instead, he chose to stay with me. That even if he couldn’t do work for Mosely anymore, that I could still be his muse.”
With a slight pause and a glare at her ex-husband, she continued, “I’m sure that’s where you would’ve been all too happy to see our story end. That you’d only intended Flynn as a sort of plaything for me at the most. That was how we played it up when you were watching, as I’m sure you recall. But when we were behind closed doors? We were as much in love as anypony else out there. When you did manage to find out, though, that was when you had your real revenge. That was when you showed me the real depths of your darkness.”
Right around then, Cameo had almost expected to hear nothing but the sound of her own voice failing to reach her intended audience. Yet, somehow, the microphone was still there. Hypothetically speaking, there was nothing around that could keep her from her ultimate goal, and that in and of itself was jarring.
She knew Mosely, maybe even better than he knew himself. Between being married to him and spying on him, she’d never had a chance to fully remove his influence from within her. If anything, in his fragile state, the producer should have been throwing a fit right now, just like he had before. He should’ve cut off the sound system by now to keep his secrets from getting out any further. At least, that’s what she had planned for him to do all this time.
Or was he already figuring out how he could throw her under the rug? After all, she had taken her sweet time getting to the actual proof of the matter. That could have bought him enough time to calm down and find a way to pin all this on her. As long as she continued to insult him in front of his own admirers, it would be all too easy for him to paint the whole encounter as the tantrums of an abusive ex-lover.
Everypony would certainly grow used to seeing Mosely’s fear that night. But for a split second, almost too tiny to be perceptible, Cameo’s face fell into an all-too-similar panic. There would be something that Mosely would always have over her, and that was the way he could plan his way out of the worst of situations. She, on the other hand, had nothing but impulsive indignation, and if it came to it, she probably couldn’t take much more damage in this verbal sparring match.
Whatever she did would be exactly what he wanted, whether she chose to speak further or not. She’d been through so much mental preparation for this moment, and yet the results would always be the same. She had been right when she’d said she wasn’t his Cameo anymore, but that would also mean that he would no longer have mercy on her.
In terms of her acceptance in high society, this would be her swan song for sure.