a thing i always come back to that i'm sure wasn't intentionally put into Crisis Core because they would have explicitly said it if they meant it, this wasn't a subtle story lmao--is about how apples work.
apple trees. orchards.
see, the thing is apples don't breed true. the genes controlling fruit characteristics are complicated as heck; the seeds from an apple will grow into an apple tree, but it almost certainly won't be the same apple they came out of. you might raise an apple tree for ten years and then find out it produces mealy little pippins even though its parent fruits were so nice. probably it won't be that big a disappointment, but you just never know.
so lonnnnnnng long ago, serious apple horticulturalists developed a preference for cloning.
you don't plant a new tree, you cultivate a cutting. or you do plant a new apple tree, but you cut into it and graft the live wood of the tree whose apples you want into the cut, so they grow together. so the new tree will bear the apples of the old.
that's the only way commercial apple orchards work now, what with variety consistency being such a big deal, but it's been the practice since premodern times. you plant a good hardy dwarf, generally, as the root and then for the fruit you pick from the available options according to your market's whims or your own taste.
Apple cultivation has been a cloning operation since long before the science of genetics. And further it's a cloning operation on the model of Jenova cloning--taking existing organisms and grafting on additional parts, additional virtues that will bear the fruits you want to process and sell, that natural chance would not have granted you.
Plants can do this naturally. Animals, having much stricter biological self-definitions, generally cannot. That's why Shinra needs the space alien involved.
Anyway I'm absolutely certain no one involved in setting up the Banora economy backstory element knew this about apples, because Genesis or Angeal would have brought it up, given Zack gets to hear about how the Banora White is nicknamed the dumbapple because it fruits continually all year like an idiot. But I have been thinking about this occasionally for over ten years.
The orchard is a wild, thousand-flower, crumpled-gate, fall-down-fence sort of place, where things grow that you’ve never asked for, that you’d never expect. The summer of ’96, the story of something flowery he thought he might have smelled at the Burrow. (Harry/Ginny, HBP)
notes: oops i tripped and fell and wrote 15,000 words on how harry potter fell in love with ginny weasley and didn't notice, the summer of '96
always wanted to write this! only took me seventeen years to get the courage to give it a go. also comes with a playlist because summer songs banish january blues
It was everywhere that summer, wasn’t it? Looking back. The truth.
He thinks he knows, now, what it felt like. Straggled grass brushing bare calves, heat under palms skimming the staircase bannister. The rap of knuckles on a new, old door.
The truth slipped in quietly. No fanfare, no fuss. Maybe if it hadn’t, he’d have known. Instead, the truth nudged itself towards him, all small, knowing smiles. Kind eyes, amused. It didn’t so much whisper in his ear as it did lightly hum: muffled, soft, but sure, totally certain.
It was there, wasn’t it, all along: strewn across that wild orchard of hard breaths and harder quaffle passes, nestled among cushions between worn sofa whispers and drooping eyelids, bubbling away in the politics of dining table chatter and clatter. Right there, in the sodding butter dish, after all.
Would he have known what to do with it, though? The truth. He imagines it, like the keen sting of a surprise ball tossed last-minute, caught hard in unready fingertips. He wouldn’t have dropped it though, he thinks.
He’d have caught it, wouldn’t he? He’d have kept it. Clung on. When it’s thrown your way - when it matters - you don’t fumble. You take it as it comes. You run with it. You soar.
It twinged, the truth, that summer. It throbbed. It lightly itched.
End of summer... harvest time! The landscape is changing by the day, as crops are gathered. The apple orchards smell divine (although you have to watch out for slightly tipsy wasps!)! The bees are still out & busy, but the birds who visit us for summer are getting ready to leave.
remembering clicking post and thinking like lol i cannot believe i am actually doing this. let me tell you, i am SO GLAD i clicked post !!! if you've read that dumb fun summery flirty little fic that i posted in the depths of winter lmao, and especially you got in touch about it or shared it or promoted it, i am so so sooo grateful to you. writing orchards was a very private solitary little joy, but seeing other people take to it and get something out of it has really been something else. not an exaggeration to say it's changed a lot about my life in a such a wonderful positive way so yeah, happy birthday to orchards, if you've read it you're a legend and i love ya, and now i'm going to listen to that silly little playlist before bed and tomorrow am going to make some roast potatoes extra crispy. loads of love!
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.