[SRP] Applicious (Apple Tini)

[belloblossom]

Apple Tini had seen and experienced a great many things in her life. She still fancied herself young, despite being a mother of two. Indeed, she had had Apple Crisp and Apple Chutney when she was very young indeed. It was just after she'd been hired as a bartender in that small town of Everville. A town that could help start-ups like herself, Apple Tini had been determined to use alcohol to be able to reinvent the apple. She had such dreams of leaving behind her family in Fall's Harvest and really sticking it to them by changing the apple that they loved so much. Her rebellious streak had been short-lived once she had two fillies to look after. Smol Fuse had been a kind mare, but no manner of mother. Tini had been too determined in her own power to return home to gain help from her family (and perhaps too ashamed of what had happened) and had thus raised Chutney and Crisp on her own. Somehow, she'd been able to handle raising two girls, seeing them off to school while she worked. She'd asked Smol Fuse in the first year or so to help take the girls from school back to Tini's home and watch over them. Tini would return in the evening, make them all dinner and tuck her daughters in. Those first few years had been the most exhausting of Tini's life. When the fillies were finally old enough to look after themselves, Smol Fuse didn't spend as much time with them, with Tini no longer needing to call her for help. The mare didn't make much of an effort to check in and when she disappeared from their lives altogether... well, perhaps that was for the best. The foals already had Tini, after all and she felt as though she was mother enough to the pair of them.

Once the pair was raised, she set them on their way, encouraging independent spirits, but assuring them that she would be there if they ever needed her. For a few months after her daughters had moved out, she went back to her job at the bar, but it hadn't been the same. Coming home to an empty house... It didn't feel relaxing, so much as... lonely. It had been then that she decided that she'd worked hard enough. It was time for a vacation! Time to do something new and exciting with her life! How fortunate for her that it was around then that she heard about a apple-themed cafe that had opened. It was over her years of being a mother that Apple Tini had realized that she no longer wanted to reinvent the apple. It was a staple in many lives and she'd certainly fed plenty of them to her daughters growing up. While she'd claimed that she was naming her daughters 'Apple' to carry on her name, she'd come to terms with the fact that she just loved apples the way they were, in all of the forms that they could take out. Who needed to reinvent the apple when it was already so marvelous? Now, knowing that there were ponies who felt similarly, so much so that they'd made a whole cafe around it, she had to go! She took time off her job to go investigate the cafe and she was not disappointed.

It had been there that she'd met Pomme, the apple-headed dullahan (though it wasn't his real head, of course, nopony could have an apple for their real head.) He and she had hit it off. Why, she'd even convinced him to let her work at this cafe. She'd not met anyone else in Everville or anywhere else she'd gone (not that it had been many places that she'd traveled; she left that to her daughters) that loved apples as much as she did. She couldn't see herself working at the bar anymore or even living in the same time. So after she'd gotten Pomme to agree to take her on as an employee in his cafe, she returned to the place she knew as home only once more. She quit her job, sold her apartment where she raised her kids and sent two letters to her daughters informing them of her new address. She moved into the same town as Pomme's store, a comfortable walking distance from the cafe.

She'd been working there for near a year, thoroughly enjoying her time there. She wanted to work there forever, but lately there had been one other thing on her mind. The handsome dullahan than ran the store. She and Pomme had been getting closer, but it had been so long since she'd had any sort of relationship with a pony. One of a romantic nature, at any rate. She felt so uncertain of herself, but these past few days, she'd worked up the confidence in herself. Tomorrow, she'd decided. Tomorrow was the day she was going to tell Pomme that she liked... no, that she loved him. She would see it through! And she would hope that he didn't fire her as a result.​