Act IV, Scene 5: Absolute Zero
There it is, Suri thought to herself, half out of annoyance and half out of some weird relief. My last card’s off the table.
Not that Coco would be likely to believe it, after everything that’d happened between the two of them. That, at least, kept Suri from being fully embarrassed about how much she’d really revealed. Still, as she glided out of the theatre, she couldn’t help but wonder what thoughts were going through her former assistant’s head. For the sake of everything she knew, she hoped Coco would take it to mean that she’d missed being able to boss her around or hurt her like she’d hurt everypony else on her road to fame.
She’d said before that she’d die from embarrassment if her sister, Sugar Belle, ever found out how close Silver Phoenix was to firing her. Yet, now, the prospect of Coco knowing that Suri had actually, sincerely missed her when she quit was so much worse.
In any case, Suri just wanted to leave that theatre, and the humiliation she’d faced there, behind as quickly as she could. At this point, she figured even selling her old apartment wasn’t past her. Anything she could do to find a new life, she would.
Or, rather, anything she could do to escape that one pony who would never leave her alone if things stayed the same. For, as soon as she’d rejected that letter and promised never to respond to it, she could almost feel how scared Coco had been all this time. Anything Mosely could do to her, he could do to Suri.
Just thinking about his retribution sent her galloping through the theatre, as if she was trapped and leaving it was her only escape. From the tiniest corners of her eyes, she could see other ponies starting to file in, but she effortlessly swerved past them every time. Barely registering their existence, or the fact that they would likely never see her again. After all, it wasn’t like they’d miss her, anyway.
We were actually coming close to maybe trusting you.
That thought was the one thing that broke through her determination, and the one thing that broke through her even then. However hesitantly and angrily Coco had said it, she was at least sincere enough to admit it. The crew could’ve driven her away right when Mosely had left, or reported her to the police alongside him. Yet somehow, they didn’t, and no matter how hard she thought about it, Suri just couldn’t comprehend why.
She was just approaching the front stage when her distracted mind finally caught up to her. Suri could barely feel some sort of object bouncing back against her, and when she finally collected herself, she noticed a duo of stallions, one pink and one blue, staring straight at her.
She admittedly still didn’t know much about one of them, the tiny, barely-grown colt of a stallion who’d called himself the play’s producer for about a month now. But, admittedly, he barely even mattered in this case, if he ever mattered at all. It only took a brief second of looking at his companion to register just what was about to pass if she didn’t move as quickly as possible.
Wright, on his own, probably wouldn’t have been too hard to deal with. But with Scene trailing him? That would be a different story.
Somehow, even with only two ponies nearby, she still felt as though she was surrounded. Even after several moments, neither talked except to open their mouths, leaving her wondering whether they were trying to threaten her or if they really were at a loss for words. Either way, she wouldn’t give them the luxury of hearing her talk through her darkness.
Especially not Scene. Especially not after those annoying feelings about him that Mosely had brought up.
Those, and everything else, would be better left concealed behind the old Suri. The one who wasn’t supposed to care about anything at all.
“Can’t you two hear?” she muttered as the two stood with their mouths agape. “I’m quitting, okay? I turned in my notice, so I’m out of here. If I can get out of here without a goodbye parade, I’d really appreciate it, and, hey, if I can make it out without one of you two singing and gloating, that’d be even better.”
She waved her hoof in front of her face, dropped the incriminating letter right at their hooves, and was about to make her grand exit when something in her told her to stop short. Nothing more than her nasty eavesdropping instinct, she supposed. Suri Polomare wasn’t supposed to feel anything more than that, she kept telling herself.
Even as she tried to ignore it like everything else, though, she still heard a voice ringing through.
“Why would you be singing when she left, exactly?” Wright asked, still confused about something else entirely.
“You know that whole theatre tradition about singing the song about the dead witch from The Wizard of Hays when somepony you don’t like gets fired?”
Suri couldn’t help but choke down a groan when she saw the way Wright stared at his director in the most naïve of ways. In that moment, and in all too many others like it, he didn’t command respect, or power, or anything. He was just some average starstruck dolt who managed to make it big, and sometimes, she felt like she was the only one who could see it.
Everypony thought he could do great things, but from the minute he walked onto that stage for the first time, Suri knew he could never be a great producer. Great producers had a very particular sort of image that he could never achieve, and even though she knew Wright was only an emergency measure, she also knew that it would be better if Spellshock would never have found a producer at all. All that bitterness, even though he’d been the one to suggest spying on the Oranges to keep her job.
She figured that had to be what she hated most about him: that he honestly thought he could replace Mosely, in more ways than one.
“I didn’t think they actually did that,” replied Wright. “They definitely didn’t at Aquafire.”
“They don’t. Or, trust me, I would’ve used up my chance to do it a month ago.”
Suri chose to scurry away just when the two ponies wrapped themselves up in another conversation, one that at least didn’t revolve around her. Sooner or later, they’d forget why they even brought up the topic in the first place, and by the time they remembered, her trail would be gone. She’d be out someplace in Manehattan nopony could find her—
“But we can’t just have one of our assistants walk out on us,” Scene finally spoke, the sound of it practically driving a firecracker into Suri’s ears. “We may have history, but we still need everypony for this show.”
It only took the tiniest of seconds for Suri to get moving again with the knowledge that nothing about any of that made sense. She knew everypony on this set like the back of her hoof enough to know that Scene had to be lying. It was just his typical, professional response to hide how he was secretly rejoicing at the revelation.
“That’s what happens when you depend on others, Scene!” she shouted as she slammed the front door, holding onto the last vestiges of her act even though he couldn’t hear her. “Who needs everypony else when it’s everypony for themselves in Manehattan?”
It was his fault for not knowing. Not hers, for the way her letter was about to disappoint him like nothing else.
****
Practically as soon as Suri returned home from a day of workless life, she found another letter peeking out of her mailbox. Knowing what such things brought, she almost ignored it, but all it took for her to open it was the address.
It wasn’t Mosely on her case again. It was Scene, probably wondering what in Equestria she could possibly be up to this time, but at least it wasn’t Mosely again.
One look at the diner she’d been summoned to meet Scene at, however, told her a letter from her richly jailed ex would have been far more appealing. When she chose to show up at the only restaurant still open at one in the morning, she figured it was only polite to humor Scene so he could tell her just how massive a mistake she’d made one last time. But, when he gestured her towards the booth she’d agreed to meet at, she noticed three ponies there instead of two. One of them, Wright himself, appeared to be lecturing another about the dangers of the impending eclipse, though the details of his talk were conspiracy theorist babble Suri could barely understand. But what she could understand was just how dangerous the other pony was to her.
Even with her fatigue, Suri would’ve recognized the blue uniform the third guest was wearing anywhere. And, almost as if he could smell her fear, he leaned into the booth as soon as she noticed him and looked her straight in the eye.
“There’s no need to panic, ma’am,” he said. “I’m Officer Quartz, and I’d just like to do some further investigation into the incriminating document you brought up.”
His face seemed leisurely enough as he rubbed his hoof across his white fur, looking almost as if he was meeting Suri at a party rather than interrogating her. As he stared at her, there was something about him that she couldn’t place, but for the time being, her mind was only focused on one thing.
“I try to quit, and you call the cops on me?” she blurted out. “I know I’ve been up to stuff in the past, but don’t you think this is at least a bit suspicious?”
The officer repeated his statement from before just after she said this, almost as if he thought she hadn’t been listening. In the meantime, Scene seemed to glare at nopony in particular, and Wright’s face was practically lighting up from the curiosity of the situation.
“On the contrary,” he said, still with the moment-killing grin, “you’re the one who seems suspicious, Miss Polomare.”
Officer Quartz practically jumped from his seat at the accusation, to say nothing of the accused herself. The room practically seemed to spin around her and morphed into something else entirely, the way she’d always imagined the factory she’d never actually entered. Somehow or another, whatever was keeping ponies from associating her with Mosely’s case was slowly ebbing away, and handing them the letter had given them the evidence they so desperately needed. Suri’s hooves itched to move, but shock surrounded her and kept her in place.
“You never struck me as the type to quit on such short notice,” Scene spoke, examining his surroundings as if he could see all the answers in front of him. “Plus, you remember what dire straits we were in when Mosely left. Not even you would want us to go through that same problem—unless another complication occurred.”
The more she looked at the scene, the more Suri figured there had to have been some sort of plan between the three stallions, and that her two coworkers were complicating it in ways beyond what a stranger would imagine. While Wright had never harassed her like some of the other ponies on set had, she could still see what was unfolding right in front of her. Whatever had turned him against her—whether it was Scene or somepony else entirely—she’d given the two most powerful ponies on set ammunition, and from her experiences in high society, only humiliation could follow.
She traced the words along the other ponies’ lips, knowing precisely what that complication was going to be. That she’d found a way to hide, to make sure ponies would forget her deeds forever, to get away with the worst of acts—
“Mosely clearly threatened you,” Wright reasoned. “The letter was dated a week ago, and you didn’t answer. We traced the rest from there.”
If Suri’s body was frozen before, by now it had hardened to absolute zero. Every last part of her stiffened, and her mouth was as wide as it had ever been. For a brief second, the pictures from the papers ran through her mind, of how the Elements of Harmony had encased Discord in stone.
Sure enough, just like him, harmony was a concept that eluded her as well. It evaded her way of mapping the world, always surprising her with its improbable twists. It may have been a welcome surprise to some, but she could smell the fake attempt a mile away.
“He didn’t,” she finally confessed as she forced herself to thaw once again. “I quit on my own terms. Why do you always think it has to go back to him?”
“Because we all know that’s how it tends to work around here,” Scene replied. “And I think we both know how a blackmailed pony acts.”
By now, his gaze had softened to a point that Suri had never seen before, at least not when he was looking at her. If she’d been more naïve, she almost would’ve called it understanding, especially from the way he brought his own issues with Mosely into this.
Ever since the play rebooted, Scene had made a point of never referring to that moment, or so the rumors said. Even an oblique reference like that was something celebrity reporters could only dream of from him. More cynical ponies would likely have seen it as him trying to dodge his acts in much the same ways that Suri had always tried, but when she really thought about it, the way he acted back then should’ve set off warning signals for everypony. Maybe, although she couldn’t see it with herself, the others could.
“He didn’t. But if it would’ve gone much longer, I think he would have. Just reading that letter, I can see that he’s already gone past the stallion I thought I knew. But for a while, I didn’t see it that way.”
The officer began to fiddle with his saddlebag, as if he was about to pull out his notebook then and there. In the meantime, both of the other stallions’ faces had moved past their initial surprise into something like pity. It was something that’d been her greatest fear in any other circumstance, but the uncharacteristic faces it took almost fueled her in that moment. The blue unicorn, in particular, made something inside her want to confess things she would have kept secret in her heart otherwise and pushed her big-city intuition to the side for the briefest of seconds.
“I quit because I was afraid,” she whispered. “Because, y’see, I saw something on opening night. I saw the pony I could’ve been.”
She half-expected to see Scene’s smirk on the other side of the table. For all the mentions of her acting strange, she figured Scene was just as out of it as she was. He could’ve been replaced by a changeling, for all she knew, but before she could retract what she’d said, the others had already begun to press her on.
“What exactly do you mean by that?” Officer Quartz asked, speaking for the first time in at least a half hour and making sweat cascade across her neck.
“It’s not exactly something I’d like to mention in front of law enforcement,” Suri muttered.
“I’ve researched all facts pertaining to this case. Please proceed.”
After several seconds of hesitant staring, he then added, “I recognize your need for crew members and will not be arresting your costume designer on this occasion. Please proceed.”
Scene’s face was uncharacteristically blank at this moment, but his mouth was already open. Knowing exactly which correction he was about to make, Suri chose to continue just when he was about to speak.
“To get to the point, anyway, I had some serious doubts about Mosely after that whole intermission incident. I’d heard some of the info in pieces before, but it didn’t really hit me until then, the whole ‘my ex is a sadistic foal-hater’ thing. But even then, I still kinda had some feelings for him at least. I mean, you don’t just cope with stuff like that right off the bat. And before I knew it, I got the letter, and…”
Just from looking at them, she felt like she barely had to say what was about to come next, yet something within her told her to. As if she needed to nail in the point even further, just to make sure they knew the trust they’d had in her had been unmerited.
“…I found myself wanting to do it. I looked at it every night and thought of ways I could sabotage everything. Going back to the way I was, it was easier than I ever could have imagined, because I barely changed to begin with. One of my friends found it and chewed me out about it, but even then, I didn’t see it until last night. I forced myself to read through it one last time, and it was opening night all over again. But if I could forget everything just like that and do what he wanted again…what could keep me from doing that forever?”
The three of them thought the case over for just long enough, giving Suri’s speech the sort of dramatic pause she relished. However, it was all-too-quickly broken, just like it usually was.
“So—let me get this straight—you were only doing this in some weird misguided attempt to get Mosely back?” Scene asked abruptly.
“That was the most emotional I’ll ever get around you, Mr. Stealer,” Suri teased, returning to some likeness of her old self. “Don’t make me repeat it.”
“So, you don’t actually like me like that?”
“Nope.”
“Do you like me like that?” Wright suddenly interrupted.
As expected, both ponies shot him death glares.
“You want her to like you like that?” interjected Scene.
“I really don’t think this is the right time for any of this,” Officer Quartz replied. “This was meant to be an investigation, not a—“
“Anyway,” Scene interrupted, “I talked with Coco after you stormed out today, and she told me you might have changed. Honestly, after what I saw of that letter, I really didn’t want to give you another chance, but I figured I’d sit and give you a chance to explain, at least. I figured the old Suri never would’ve quit out of the blue like that, and besides…”
He stared at her for a few brief moments, and in those pauses, everything almost seemed like an act. Scene would go back to hating her after the quiet moments ended, and everything would seem right again. Yet here he went again, back to his incomprehensible self.
“…the old Suri would’ve done it without question, too.”
Seeing the look of utter shock on Suri’s face, he continued, “Don’t take this as me forgiving you. I’m still not over anything you did back then, and I’ll be patrolling extra hard to make sure you don’t go back to following Mosely again. But this time, I’ll be doing at least part of it for you. ‘Cause, as much as I hated the way you used to be, that means I’ll have to try extra hard to make sure you don’t get that way again. Besides, we always need some assistants around the set.”
By the time he said that last sentence, he was back to his usual, serious tone. For all Suri could’ve known, that could’ve been the entire reason he chose to bring her back, but knowing that she had at least some chance of getting on his good side helped.
This new Suri that was being made only helped him to keep the old off the streets, but this was always something she could settle for. Because her attraction to him was just about as long gone as her old self. It’d been a brief curiosity, the possibility of getting together with Mosely’s younger and more handsome director. Maybe it’d even been some tiny way of getting back at Coco for the way she’d left her back then.
In any case, someday, she’d be able to tell Scene that it was completely wiped away from her mind, and she vowed to herself that she’d be able to tell him Mosely was gone in her head in the very same moment. As the group went back into recounting the case, all Suri could think about was just how long she’d have to retain this repulsive attraction, how her mind would still wrap itself into loving someone that represented all the worst parts of herself.
The next thing she heard through these thoughts, however, was the one way she could speed up the process.
“We didn’t bring Officer Quartz in to take you away,” Wright finally said. “We figured you wanted to hurt Mosely from the way you quit, and thought we could help you find a better way of doing that.”
Almost on cue, the police officer removed his cap to reveal a spiky, creamy orange mane. Suri barely even had to see the cutie mark to know where this was going, and yet just like before, he felt the need to clarify his presence.
“The name’s Officer Tangerine Quartz, ma’am,” he said with a strangely charming grin on his face. “I’m head of the Orange investigation campaign, and your document could be a valuable commodity to us.”
She shouldn’t have been surprised, not in the slightest. He didn’t resemble Mosely so much as his sister Valencia did, but the tiniest of similarities were still there. Still, in all her limited experience with the Oranges, the possibility that there was a third foal from Mosely’s line had never come to her.
“And if you’re worried about any conflicts of interest, don’t be. I was never raised under their system. I was kept from ever knowing my siblings like any other family would. I was always told I would be the Orange family’s rebellion itself.”
Tangerine never realized just how true that would be, Suri couldn’t keep herself from thinking. Yet he barely needed to ask the question before a response burst through her heart. The chance for revenge had come, at any cost.
Mosely had changed her.
It was time for her to change him.
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Things just got interesting...
The more things change the more they stay the same, cutting down others to keep herself up.
You know I get the feeling she must have some drow blood in her...
8178671
The key is just to get her to channel those desires for good...
8178711 The only way that kind of attitude could be continuously channeled for good would probably be in the espionage service and I wouldn't trust Suri there unless the far better spy and tailor Elim Garak was monitoring her to shoot her in the back the moment she crossed the wrong lines.
Good work suri. You'll really knock Mosley for a loop going against him. Again his arrogance in thinking he's above things is his downfall
8193575
Hope you enjoy it!
Wait, WHAT
?! Sugar Belle and Suri are sisters?!
8178752
And he can put her to work as an assistant tailor too! Don't know if he should shoot her if she losses that up...