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[butnotyet]

The grin he gives her in reply is an easy one; it's the sort that crinkles up his eyes, stretches out his cheeks, eases tension in the back of his neck and shoulders. (Is he even aware of that tension in the first place? Eh, probably not.)

"You might, although there also might be enough other ones around the neighborhood generally that you'd be fine," he allows, and stops and thinks about it for long enough to realize "— not that I'm actually sure whether or not this one's going to bear fruit ever. They always do in orchards, anyway — I hope you know the trick to that, because in all my experience farming, I never did all that much with orchard management."

And:

"Are you not going to answer the question, though?"

[auferstanden]

"What ques—"

But then it dawns on her, of course, much as he has forgotten to even bring up the dinner he'd implied they were going to have together to make up for the Drowning Incident, Sarah has forgotten to finish the point about the quicksand.

"— oh. It's not a nightmare because it isn't frightening. It's just a dream about quicksand. And yes, apple trees where I come from cannot self-fertilize, so it will need a mate. If it's like the ones I'm used to it's hermaphroditic, thus any tree of the same species will do. Hopefully won't be too difficult to find."

[butnotyet]

"Hermaphrodites unwilling to perform parthenogenesis, though?" He scoffs, but his eyes are full of laughter. "Someone is feeling entirely too picky — I promise you another apple tree, then. Does it need to be the same sub-species, or is that only if you don't want it to keep hybridizing...?"

He ... well, okay, he sort of knows what he's talking about, with trees; he's just rusty.

"Also, I hope it's all right if I don't provide it tonight — the seller was about to go home, when I picked this one up."

[auferstanden]

"Every apple tree I've ever met has insisted on having a mate," Sarah confirms, with a solemn nod. "I wouldn't want to produce offspring on my own either, both because that would be weird and because clones aren't any good for genetic variations."

Her people had enough problems with consanguinity occasionally producing an unanticipated genetic quirk generations later as it was.

"Of course it's all right, I thought you were feeding me?" Mark this as the return of the grin; it's impossible to say if he's actually growing on her or if it's just that when he smiles she does.

[butnotyet]

"I wonder what it was, then, about the ones I remember from Koniortos —"

He frowns, dropping his gaze, and rubs at the spot between his eyes for just a moment. "I know they can't possibly have been arranged in an orchard, and any pollination was manual — skeletal, maybe — but not by insects, at any rate. Maybe they were grafted — does that work, with apples? Sticking two of them together on one set of roots?"

[auferstanden]

"Oh, sure. Pretty much any fruit tree I've had any real experience with can be grafted." That's basically all the fruit trees that will grow in the United States, at least in the climate zone whose number Sarah finds herself unable to remember—it's the one that has apple trees, anyway.

"So long as you know how to graft a tree, you can graft an apple tree, they're pretty good with it. You can also graft apple and pear trees together, that's always fun—did you have a plan for dinner, by the way, or are we making it up as we go?"

They're in Willful Machine, so it couldn't possibly be difficult.

[butnotyet]

"Oh, we are absolutely making it up as we go," he confesses freely, a wry smile twisting his lips. "I may be offering to pay for it — that doesn't mean I actually know what you like, or even necessarily have a very good grasp of what restaurants are currently open to clientele, here — just that there's bound to be something we can agree on. I, for one, am not terribly picky about what I eat."

(Given that he can survive just about anything short of a bomb, and even some of those, that is.)

He gestures away from her stand. "I don't know if the tree needs to come with us, or if it will be safe here, or if you've got somewhere else you need to store it, first?"