“Do you name your crops?”
Apple Fritter blinked and looked up. “What?”
Strawberry shrugged. “Your plants. Do you give them names?”
“What?! Of course I don’t,” Apple Fritter remarked with a laugh. Her laughter quickly faded when she saw Strawberry looking at her strangely. “You… you’re not serious, are you?”
“I’m dead serious,” Strawberry replied. “This is serious stuff! You’re taking something and giving it life, like a foal. You’re raising it and one day, it’s going to return the favor. But only if you treat it well.”
Apple Fritter just stared as Strawberry patted one of the sprouts on its head. “You… So you're telling me you named your plants?”
“Yup! There was Sammy, Sebastian, Seymour, See-less, Syracuse, Sherman, and Greg.”
“...Greg?”
“Greg died first. One of the teenagers I hired thought he was a weed and yanked him out.” Strawberry shrugged.
“Did you… give him a funeral or somethin’?”
“I’m not that attached to my plants,” Strawberry scoffed.
Apple Fritter raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m just sayin’, I never named my pastries.”
“Well of course,” Strawberry said, clicking her tongue. “You just eat them. Plants are different, you gotta care for them, make sure they’re healthy.”
“Fine, I never named my ovens either,” Apple Fritter said, sticking out her tongue.
“Maybe you should’ve,” Strawberry fired back, grinning.
Apple Fritter went back to her work, carefully analyzing the tiny tomato plant below her. The cynical part of her thought that naming plants was still silly, but if Strawberry thought it was a good idea…
“Hey, you should do that sometime,” Strawberry said aloud, pulling Apple Fritter from her thoughts.
“Hm? Do what?”
“Bake,” Strawberry elaborated, staring up at the sky. “I… I’d love to try some of your stuff. It’s been forever since I had a treat that didn’t taste like lead and acrylic… Or brought something that didn’t come with seventeen warnings about products known to cause sickness in ponies slapped on it.”
“I’d love to,” Apple Fritter replied sincerely. “If this garden works out I’ll bake you more treats than you could ever eat.”
Strawberry laughed, ruffling her feathers good-naturedly. “I’d love that.”
“You should see what I could do with a whole garden full of stuff,” Apple Fritter continued. “Squashes, pumpkins, beets… tons of apples of course. Pears, grapes maybe… ‘course all that’d take room that the city just plain don’t got.” Her ears drooped at that.
“Y’know, I never really liked apples,” Strawberry said.
Apple Fritter whirled around. “What?!”
“Maybe I never had one that didn’t taste of industrial farming,” Strawberry conceded, holding up her hooves in mock surrender. “They just taste too much like steam tractor for me.”
“Oh. Yeah, most apples at the market…they just ain’t right,” Apple Fritter agreed. “Don’t grow ‘em like they used to.”
Strawberry sighed. “What I wouldn’t give for fresh, organic strawberries… honestly, I’d eat them whole, stem and all if I could get my hooves on some.”
“... you city ponies are weird,” Apple Fritter muttered.
The two fell quiet again.
Deep beneath the earth, Apple Fritter felt the rumblings of a train passing by. Its steam poked up over the sides of the buildings, and the earth shook more and more as it drew closer to them.
Strawberry had paused in her work too to look towards the tracks. A terse frown crossed her lips, and she almost looked angry. “This…this isn’t a place to grow up,” she muttered.
“It really ain’t,” agreed Apple Fritter. “It really ain’t.”
“It’s so hard to remember there’s a world beyond the city,” Strawberry said, biting her lip. “With so much of this technology and stuff… It's like the rest of the world doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know, there was this… wonder I used to have as a foal. That there were things I’d have to discover, new things to see and learn. There was just something magical in the unattainable. Now… Now it seems all you need to do is get on a train and you can have everything you ever want. Nobody wants to know anything anymore. Nobody wants to go anywhere.”
“Well…what do you wanna do?” Apple Fritter asked cautiously.
“Me? I…I thought I wanted this promotion,” Strawberry whispered.
“And now?”
“Now... now I think I want to get out of here.”
Apple Fritter stood, wiping the dirt from her body, and approached the pegasus. She gently put a hoof on Strawberry’s back and rubbed small circles into it.
The train arrived, engines and pistons roaring and screaming while the whistle shrieked into their ears.
The noise made it impossible to talk, but at that moment, Strawberry felt there wasn’t anything to say anyways. Instead, she spread a wing and wrapped it around Apple Fritter’s body in a hug.
They stood in silence as the train passed them by, carriages blurring together and making the sections of the train morph into an endless shape. Neither of them watched it, with Strawberry dipping her head to the ground instead.
When it finally passed, the silence came crashing in.
Strawberry blinked, she felt something trail down her cheek and fall into the dirt. There were small stains in it, and when she touched her cheek it came up wet. “Ah, geez,” she muttered as she wiped the tears out of her eyes. “I… I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
Apple Fritter said nothing, letting Strawberry lean into her.
“I gotta get out of here,” she whispered. “I want to go...I want to go home.” The last part was little more than a breath, the words almost silent. But it was true. She had been here in the city so long, she had all but forgotten how it felt to have real, living earth beneath her hooves. Instead of dead concrete and stone. She wanted to go home.
“Tom,” Apple Fritter said.
“Huh?”
Apple Fritter pointed to the tomato plant she had been tending to. “I’m gonna name him Tom.”
That got a smile out of Strawberry. “Oh? Well, what do you know? I’ll make a farmer out of you yet.”
“I am a farmer!”
With that, they laughed and withdrew from their embrace, each returning to their spots.
As Strawberry hovered over the potato plants, she turned to watch the now receding form of the distant train.
Then she turned back to Apple Fritter, who was watering the tomato plants, and a thought occurred to her.
Ah, screw Gasket. I’m going to help her. I don’t know how yet, but… I’m not leaving this place without her.
With that, she nodded in affirmation and returned to her work.