doctor who fic, the trick to eating apples
Title: the trick to eating apples
Author: ivy_chan
Rating: G
Fandom: Doctor Who
Words: 505
Characters: Amy
Summary: Amelia Pond doesn't like apples, as a rule, but she does have an exploitable weakness for fun.
The year she turns six, she hates apples. Any kind, really. They have an apple tree outside: Orange Pippin, its trunk squat and gnarled and its branches unromantically bulky with fruit. There’s a big fuss made over the sort of apples they are, and presumably they’re one of the best-tasting. Amelia thinks they don’t taste like much of all aside from earthy and sour, but her mother likes her to eat them.
“Now, look,” she says, “We’ve got a great tree of apples out there for the eating, it’s just a waste if you don’t eat a bit.”
And so she serves them: in pies, in sauces, in turnovers and raw. Amelia can tolerate them all, except for when the fruit is served raw. When they haven’t got butter and sugar and spice added to them, and there’s nothing but sour and mealy-sweetness curling over her tongue. She spits them out rather than eat them, and hides the fragments of her apple slices in the jade plant pot. It’s not a particularly good hiding place, but Amy is six. She learns about hiding spots much later.
There’s nothing horrible about apples, really. Amelia has eaten far worse things, and she’d rather eat an apple fresh off the tree than, say, a worm or a beetle. It’s the feeling she has on her tongue, maybe. Crumbly and wet at the same time.
Her mother sends her apples to school sometimes, and she sends them back untouched. The third week, her mother hides an apple in a napkin, and when she unrolls the fruit, it tumbles out and frowns at her. Literally. Her mother scratched a grumpy face into its polished surface. ‘Eat me,’ the note reads, ‘or there will be Consequences!!’
It doesn’t taste any better when she bites into it, but her mind is far too occupied with thoughts of apples bearing consequences to bother with disgust. Perhaps they are pirate apples and they have prepared a mutiny. Or they have a sinister plan involving apple sauce-makers. It’s best to eat the messenger, she decides, on the heels of a happy flight of fantasy.
The next shipment of lunch apples come in a whole assortment of faces: sad, or happy, or grinning, or a pirate-face. Never in slices, because that would leave it faceless entirely, and there was no sense of fun in that. The messages go back and forth, in many-folded slips of paper and apple seeds between her teeth. She picks fruit from the tree on her own volition and scratches a face in it to fill a mood, or two apples to have a conversation.
When she tastes, it still starts off as a tart, crisp tingle, a sour-sweet mealiness that sticks in her throat. It’s not a bad taste, anymore. It’s just a taste.
For her, the food for imagination has always been more nourishing than plain old food for the body. Just give her a story, give her something to believe in, and she’ll swallow any bitterness it comes with.
Author: ivy_chan
Rating: G
Fandom: Doctor Who
Words: 505
Characters: Amy
Summary: Amelia Pond doesn't like apples, as a rule, but she does have an exploitable weakness for fun.
The year she turns six, she hates apples. Any kind, really. They have an apple tree outside: Orange Pippin, its trunk squat and gnarled and its branches unromantically bulky with fruit. There’s a big fuss made over the sort of apples they are, and presumably they’re one of the best-tasting. Amelia thinks they don’t taste like much of all aside from earthy and sour, but her mother likes her to eat them.
“Now, look,” she says, “We’ve got a great tree of apples out there for the eating, it’s just a waste if you don’t eat a bit.”
And so she serves them: in pies, in sauces, in turnovers and raw. Amelia can tolerate them all, except for when the fruit is served raw. When they haven’t got butter and sugar and spice added to them, and there’s nothing but sour and mealy-sweetness curling over her tongue. She spits them out rather than eat them, and hides the fragments of her apple slices in the jade plant pot. It’s not a particularly good hiding place, but Amy is six. She learns about hiding spots much later.
There’s nothing horrible about apples, really. Amelia has eaten far worse things, and she’d rather eat an apple fresh off the tree than, say, a worm or a beetle. It’s the feeling she has on her tongue, maybe. Crumbly and wet at the same time.
Her mother sends her apples to school sometimes, and she sends them back untouched. The third week, her mother hides an apple in a napkin, and when she unrolls the fruit, it tumbles out and frowns at her. Literally. Her mother scratched a grumpy face into its polished surface. ‘Eat me,’ the note reads, ‘or there will be Consequences!!’
It doesn’t taste any better when she bites into it, but her mind is far too occupied with thoughts of apples bearing consequences to bother with disgust. Perhaps they are pirate apples and they have prepared a mutiny. Or they have a sinister plan involving apple sauce-makers. It’s best to eat the messenger, she decides, on the heels of a happy flight of fantasy.
The next shipment of lunch apples come in a whole assortment of faces: sad, or happy, or grinning, or a pirate-face. Never in slices, because that would leave it faceless entirely, and there was no sense of fun in that. The messages go back and forth, in many-folded slips of paper and apple seeds between her teeth. She picks fruit from the tree on her own volition and scratches a face in it to fill a mood, or two apples to have a conversation.
When she tastes, it still starts off as a tart, crisp tingle, a sour-sweet mealiness that sticks in her throat. It’s not a bad taste, anymore. It’s just a taste.
For her, the food for imagination has always been more nourishing than plain old food for the body. Just give her a story, give her something to believe in, and she’ll swallow any bitterness it comes with.