The embers in the cigar had climbed high as Macintosh did his daily inspections. He felt the flavored smoke tickle his sinuses and dry his eyes as he poked a hoof about the corn stalks. A few ear rots here and there, but nothing unmanagable, the cornfields would probably bring in a profit equal to or at least near that which came from the orchard.

"Eeyup." Macintosh's single thought left his mouth in a cloud of rolling smoke, the corn stalk that had been held in his hoof now swayed back in a hunch in the opposite direction. He chewed the cap of the cigar for a second as he scanned the rest of the slender, healthy stalks. Spotting nothing of note his first, albeit thorough, inspection did not reveal he turned and tapped his ashes into the dirt.

Out in the orchard, Applejack kicked at a rather stubborn tree with its fruit held in a deathgrip. Applebloom was for once outdoing her sister, her little bucket having long been overflowed. She had neither the strength nor endurance of her older siblings but the trees were far more polite to her, offering their fruit in full in return for her comparatively gentle kicks. Soon she would reach her fourth bucket of fruit, after which she would be allowed to leave the farm to play with her friends.

One such friend, a young filly perhaps known better as the "little tag-along" of the fashion designer Rarity, watched the small clouds of smoke as they traveled to and fro in the corn field. She watched as they would stop and fade away, only to puff out into the atmosphere a few paces away from where they last were. Marking the clouds' positions, she ventured into the long skinny crops she had previously been so very much afraid of, especially after Applejack had placed a rather ugly scarecrow in the middle of it all. However, the thoughts of the sightless button eyes left her mind as she heard his deep voice humming a familiar tune.

"A little birdie told me you skipped breakfast again." She said, skipping down the rows of stalks.

"Sounds like that lil' bird has a big mouth." He said with a grin, plucking the cigar from his mouth to tap out the ashes once more.

"You know that isn't good for you right?" Sweetie Belle said as she sat down her saddle bag. Macintosh rolled his eyes as he occupied himself with another stalk.

"Well, aren't you gonna ask what I got for you today?" She asked, crossing a forehoof over the other and hoping it looked more impatient than nervous. Macintosh turned away to heave the inevitable sigh but answered the filly anyway.

"I suppose I should," Macintosh chewed at the cigar cap to readjust it in his teeth. "But I'm gettin' the feelin' ya got the wrong idea here Sweetie Belle."

"Ugh, not this again." Sweetie strolled up to the towering stallion and gave a gentle kick to the bottom of his forehoof. She craned her head up to see the other's eyes staring down at her, one eyebrow raised high. Sweetie collapsed back on her haunches as the seconds of silence passed by and the weight of Macintosh's glare finally pushed her resolve down.

"What do you think I'm trying to do?" The filly spread her forehooves wide, the sandwich in the saddle bag now forgotten where it lay behind her.

"I think you're gettin' too close for bein' so young. Ya ain't even got your Cutie Mark yet and already tryin' fer older stallions." Macintosh turned away from the filly sitting at his hooves and resumed checking his crops. Truth be told, he did find Sweetie Belle to be endearing. It was her eyes after all. However, cute or not she was simply too young to understand what a relationship truly was and how immoral it would be for one to be held between a full-grown stallion and a foal without so much as a definable Cutie Mark.

Sweetie turned red in the face and hopped to a standing position. She took care to avert her eyes from the stallion standing in front of the sun, feeling cold enough in his long cast shadow and ran back to her saddlebags. Macintosh, sensing he had upset her chose not to face her, knowing that doing so could stimulate further conversation and make the problem worlds more awkward.

Sweetie had the straps of the saddle bag in her teeth, fully intent on dragging it behind her all the way home before she remembered how much care she had put into its contents and let it sag back down to the ground. Though her shame at having her "secret crush" thrown out into the daylight had made her lip quiver and her eyes water, she couldn't help but try to get the last word. She was her sister's sibling after all.

"Well whats wrong with that huh?" She cried stamping a hoof into the loose dirt, a miniature crater from an emotion-driven bomb.

He answered with nothing more than another puff of smoke and the rustle of another healthy ear of corn.

"Well?" Her voice cracked, something Macintosh found every bit as heart-melting as the eyes.

"I know I'm not like my sister or Miss Cheerilee but I-" she paused and kicked at the lip of the crater she had made, dark soil shooting up like muddy water.

"I'm still trying here!" She felt her face grow hot and scrubbed at it. Only little fillies cried in front of stallions after all, and she could do better than her teacher, or she thought. Her sister for that matter too, especially with all her disdain for the hard lifestyle the Apple family lead.

"Sweetie Belle you're just a little filly, you don't know the first thing about what you're trying to get into." Macintosh was losing his patience. Surely she could spend her affections elsewhere, perhaps on a colt a year or two older than her if not one her exact same age. But the little filly stood her ground, eyes watery or not.

"I do understand!" She cried, her voice cracking again as her emotions got the better of her.

"Just cause I'm not as old as you doesn't mean I couldn't..." Sweetie Belle let her eyes drop from the back of Macintosh's head and fall to her hooves, as if there were prompt cards hidden somewhere just under the soil.
"No, you couldn't." Macintosh spoke without giving the words much thought. Whether she meant 'I could be your girlfriend' or 'I could sleep with you', both were things he could even bring himself to think about.

Sweetie Belle let herself go silent, her mouth hung open as the stallion's words left his mouth so carelessly. He wasn't even bothering to look at her, which perhaps wasn't such a bad thing now considering she couldn't control her frustrated tears anymore. She scrubbed them away again roughly and sniffled as quietly as she could.

Big Macintosh heard the sound despite Sweetie's best attempt to cut it off. He swore he could actually feel some physical part of his resolve snap in half like a brittle bone, and he turned to look at her. The little filly had a hoof held over her eyes, not exactly weeping but at the very least noticably crying.

Now once upon a time, some time ago when Macintosh had been a young colt he had found himself in a bad situation. Another colt four years his senior had caught him on his way home, three other older colts at his side for insurance for his planned deeds. The accusation had been that Macintosh had slept with the colt's girlfriend, or rather his ex-girlfriend. The truth of the matter was that the mare had been trying to make her ex-lover jealous and come running back to her, away from the open legs of another mare from the countryside.

This ignorance cost Macintosh a swift kick to his nose and a rather difficult explanation for his Granny. But rather than the pain of having his nose nearly broken, he mostly remembered the smell. Not only of his own blood flooding his nostrils but something else, a kind of smell that was perhaps a figment of a guilty mind. Though he was not at fault for anything other than being the colt that mares put on a pedestal, he had felt guilty for something he couldn't quite put his hoof on. And the smell that came with that feeling was like iron and rain.

As he watched the filly's dignity flood out from her eyes he swore he could smell the blood and iron again, wet from a humid and miserable downpour.

"Sweetie Belle..." He called out to her and he stepped towards her. Macintosh wasn't entirely sure what he intended to do, figuring that a tight hug would defeat his original purpose. But she gave him no time to think as she darted away from him into the corn.

"Hey!" He called, chasing after her. Sweetie didn't look behind her, she just gained more and more speed as the crops she skirted collided with Macintosh's face and knocked the stub of tobacco away.

"Sweetie stop!" The filly ducked her head and ran faster, not caring where the path she took would take her. She did not look up again until Macintosh cried out to her one last time and her hooves met a familiar shadow.

Sweetie Belle screamed as she nearly collided facefirst into the scarecrow's perch's, the soulless button eyes staring down lifelessly at the filly that went crashing down into the dirt. She whimpered as she felt the ground bite at her ribs, pain burning its way through her nerves.

Macintosh was only a few feet away when Sweetie Belle went down. He could have pinned her down in those few seconds, made her listen to why he would not--no, COULD not be who she wanted. He'd also tell her what the law would do to him, how he'd be taken away to a jail cell far away in Canterlot.

But he didn't. He just watched the sniffling filly pull herself up to her hooves, her self-esteem long lost somewhere in the corn behind them.

"Sweetie Belle they'd put me away." She turned to look back at him, her eyes now reading something more than anguish.

"I'd be a criminal." He didn't move after that, just stared at Sweetie Belle with an apologetic gaze.

"Why would I tell anyone?" She stared back, and Macintosh didn't have an answer for her question. No marefriend, regardless of her age, would rat out the stallion she loved.

The problem was that he did not love her in return. Not like she needed him to.

"Just go home Sweetie Belle." Macintosh ducked his head down, feeling the heavy miserable weight of responsibility pulling his shoulders down. He walked out of the cornfield before she had a chance to push at his resolve again.

***

He should have seen this coming, he thought. Sweetie Belle had shown up at the farm for roughly the last two months, each day with either conversation or treats to share with the stallion. And at first that was alright, the topics were innocent and the treats were simple things like caramel lollipops and strawberry taffy.

But then one day she had shown up with a large muffin in her saddle bag that she claimed she had made herself. Macintosh had smiled and took the muffin from her outstretched hoof and pulled off the plastic wrap she had preserved it in.

The blueberries made him question Sweetie's motives. He didn't feel it was quite a coincidence that the filly had not only guessed his favorite flavor, but made the muffin massive enough to kill off even his worst morning hunger. It just seemed like too much effort to be a simple friendly gesture. And then the nurture came, with its shoulder rubs, motherly griping, and reminders that she would IN FACT see him the next day and not to tire himself out too much.

"So uh....you talking to any colts in school?" Macintosh had asked one day, a grape hard-candy courtesy of his little "friend" sweetening the inside of his left cheek. Sweetie Belle was busying herself with the apples Macintosh had bucked, checking them for hungry insects as she had seen Applebloom do on many occassions.

"Ugh, are you kidding?" She dropped her apple back down into the bucket with a look of sincere disgust on her tiny features.

"They're all so....." Sweetie pursed her lips as she racked her mind for an adequate word.

"Irr-i-tating." Sweetie blurted the word out in pieces, doing her best to mimic the word her sister had used so often. The stallion beside her sucked the candy to the other side of his mouth with an audible click of his tongue, saying nothing.

"Do you have a special somepony?" Sweetie looked up at him, an excited glow in her eyes and her tail wagging from side to side slowly.

"Nnope. Can't say ah do." Macintosh immediately regretted those words, catching a full smile from the filly out of the corner of one eye.

***

Big Macintosh trudged back out of the cornfield, having watched Sweetie Belle sprint off in the opposite direction. She had the good graces not to wail at least, because a stallion and a crying filly alone together in a corn field is never a good situation to be caught in. He nosed his way through the crops when he noticed the discarded saddlebag still lying dejected in the soil.

Mac picked up the saddlebag with his teeth, noting that it was made of a jean-like material but dyed a cross between violet and blue. No dount this had been crafted by her older sister, probably due to its compliments to Sweetie Belle's pearly-white fur color. He hooked a hoof through the bags and shook them, noticing a bit of weight in the left bag.

Setting the bag carefully back down to the ground, he poked one hoof under the lip of the flap and unlatched the hook holding it down. With his other hoof he reached into the pack and felt his hoof come into contact with something cold. Pulling the object out revealed it to be a jelly jar filled with cold milk, the jar cleverly having been selected as a piece of glassware nopony would care to miss. A second venture into the bag found a squishy, paper-towel wrapped bundel.

He tore the paper open with the tip of a hoof. Inside was a simple wheat-bread bound combination of peanut butter and red plum jam. Care had obviously been taken to make sure the jam did not dribble between the wheat slices, and there was enough peanut butter to fill but not choke. Altogether a simple snack, but for Macintosh, who sat back on his haunches and stared at the bag it had came from, it was anything but simple considering this was probably the second week in a row that she had brought him lunch each day.

The least that could happen was a heartfelt apology to the filly, and perhaps the offer that he'd seek her out for a date when she was older. Whether or not he followed through with it in the future was all up to fate, but for now she needed his intervention.

Macintosh stuffed both items back in the saddlebag and sprinted after the filly, ghosts of her presence winding through the stalks back out onto the road to Ponyville.

***

"Well......Sweetie." Rarity placed a hoof on her sister's shoulder to emphasize that her next words were straight to the point.

"Mr. Macintosh is just much too old for you Sweetie. I'd be surprised if he wasn't more than twice your age." Rarity felt her stomach turn as the awkward conversation continued. Sure she had known about Sweetie Belle's little crush. Apparently, Scootaloo and herself were the only two ponies to actually know about her admiration for the farm pony. And who could blame her honestly? Sure he was a common laborer, never kept his mane tidy, always had dirt on his hooves, and chain-smoked the most musky smelling and cheap cigars she had ever seen. But he WAS rather tall, and equally muscular. If eye candy was what her baby sister was after then she certainly aimed high.

"But whats wrong with that?" The filly whined, her hooves pressing down on the tabletop in frustration so profound it stood out on her face in a tinge of red.

"Sweetie you're just a little filly," Rarity began, at a loss for how to adequately answer. "and he's a full grown stallion."

"Ugh, that's the same thing he said." Sweetie pushed her juice box away as she jumped down from her perch.

"Honestly Sweetie, not only would it be illegal--"

"Why would I tell anypony?"

"Let me finish." Rarity held a hoof up as she levitated the half-full juice carton away from the table and into the refridgerator.

"What I was going to say was that not only could you get Mr. Macintosh into a lot of trouble, but also you simply wouldn't know how to care for a stallion yet. Goodness knows they can't care for themselves." She flashed her sister a flirty grin.

"I'm already taking care of him." Sweetie Belle said with a stamp of her hoof. Her sister had to stifle her laughter with a hoof pressed firmly over her lips, still in absolute adoration of her baby sister's charm in even these circumstances.

"No really! I make him lunch everyday--"

"That's adorable Sweetie, but really--" Rarity was cut off mid-sentence as she thought of all the simple dishes her sister was probably selecting for the stallion.

"I rub his shoulders."

"Yes but--"

"I yell at him when he doesn't eat breakfast."

"Um--"

"I sneak into his room and clean it up while he's working."

Rarity held a hoof to her chest.

"I got rid of all his dirty magazines and I even put a nightlight in his room so he wouldn't trip if he had to pee."

Rarity's mouth fell open, halfway because of the filly's dedication and the other half at her knowledge of what an "adult magazine" was and her discipline regarding such things. Sweetie mistook Rarity's shock as further inquisition.

"He works really hard," she nodded, "so I figured the nightlight would help if he had sleep-gunk in his eyes at night."

"Sweetie I....I'm not sure what to say." Rarity said the last part to the wall rather than her sister, her mind completely blanking and hoping the teal wallpaper would provide an answer.

"He's a silly stallion sometimes, but that's why he needs me." Sweetie Belle puffed out her chest a little bit, feeling pride swell inside her where frustration burned only minutes before.

Author's Note

As always criticism and flames are encouraged!
They help make me a better writer.
However I ask that you keep an open mind when reading this story!

And if you enjoy it so far, leave a comment and a like!