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prologue.
It is said that the most beautiful and rare plants in the Garreg Mach Greenhouse are from lovers with advanced hanahaki disease. They say that the name of the disease comes from the old tongues, now lost, and its ancient nature reflects forgotten yet integral magicks. In the disease’s late stages, plants grow from the lungs of these poor souls, and they can be pulled, fully open blossoms, stems, leaves, and roots, from gasping mouths.
“Wouldn’t that be awful,” Mercedes sighs as she and Ferdinand gather white roses for the head chef on a frigid morning in the Guardian Moon.
Ferdinand, hands full with the cloth-lined basket, nods. “I have never heard of anyone whose disease progressed so far.”
“I would think it would have to be very rare,” Mercedes agrees, clipping the thorns close to the last rose they need. “Hanahaki’s severity is related to how deeply in love someone is, especially when the other person doesn’t reciprocate.”
She cuts the rose from its stem. Ferdinand lifts the basket, and she sets the flower on top of their bounty. Inside the greenhouse, the air is humid and warm, a long and unchanging memory of summer. Mercedes smiles, and her right cheek dimples with the expression.
“Or do you think it’s romantic?” she asks as Ferdinand draws the long edge of the cloth over the flowers. “After all, most people never get to experience that depth of love.”
Ferdinand smiles. Outside, Garreg Mach Monastery is chilly, but the weather is ever mild. They begin their walk to the kitchens, taking the scenic route by the pond. It’s glowing today. Linhardt and Byleth are already on the peer, rods in hand and buckets set in wait behind them.
“I would not consider a disease romantic,” Ferdinand says.
“No,” Mercedes sighs. “I suppose not.”
They climb the stone stairs and do not expect to speak of hanahaki disease ever again.
one.
The first time Ferdinand coughs up plant matter from his lungs, it is a single green leaf with smooth edges and a tiny hint of a green stem attached. It plops onto his gloved fist and falls, damp with saliva and without ceremony, onto his vest.
“Oh,” Lorenz says, eyes very wide; he sits ramrod straight across Ferdinand at the tea table in the commander’s quarters of the Bridge of Myrddin. “Oh.”
In the entire time that Ferdinand has known Lorenz, which is now nearly six full years, he has never been speechless. Ferdinand himself is, too, but he has the excuse of being the one to quite suddenly cough up a leaf. He holds it between his thumb and forefinger, turning it over in the mid-afternoon light.
“Has this,” Lorenz starts, and he puts his half-drunk teacup down on his saucer with a faint clink, “happened before?”
Ferdinand shakes his head. The leaf looks healthy, not like the usual stories of hanahaki he has read where pieces of rough plant matter emerge stained with blood from their ignoble exit through wheezing, sputtering coughs. In opera, nearly every hanahaki sufferer has roses and other thorned, meaningful flowers, and their lungs and upper digestive tract are made raw to match their tortured hearts.
Perhaps such things come later, Ferdinand thinks in the walled off part of himself that has learned to think through even the worst feelings.
“Are you –” Lorenz starts, and he is less calm, so Ferdinand hastens to answer:
“No,” Ferdinand says, and he sets the leaf carefully on the side of his saucer. “I would not consider myself ‘in love’ with anyone at this time.”
Lorenz boggles at him. Ferdinand watches his mouth open and close as he blinks rapidly.
“But –” Lorenz starts before he admirably stops himself; he knows that Ferdinand is not a liar; he presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose and frowns. “We were talking about the logistics of transporting river crabs…”
“Yes,” Ferdinand says, and he lifts his teacup, feeling like he could use the taste of Bergamot to clear his mouth.
The leaves and tiny bits of stem become a regular occurrence. Ferdinand coughs them up with no clear indication of why or how, and he does not feel particularly compelled to examine the reasoning.
It is not characteristic of early signs of hanahaki. Ferdinand is not in love with anyone. Lorenz respects his word on that, but it still filters out quickly into the rumour mill, which is how Ferdinand learns that it’s always petals or parts of the flower that come first. Ferdinand overhears the unquiet speculation that perhaps he is afflicted by a variant of hanahaki; that he is perhaps not in love but rather the target of someone else’s affections; that he has been cursed by the enemy; that he is in fact a witch or a skinchanger swapped with a human child, showing his true colours now that he is fully an adult.
“I will stop their gossiping,” Lorenz promises Ferdinand when the latter two rumours reach his ears.
“Idle gossip does no harm,” Ferdinand says, and he laughs a little bit because of how sour Lorenz’s expression is; it is very nice to have someone so concerned for his reputation. “No one is being untoward. It is only speculation and a healthy dose of old wives’ tales.”
“Some would say hanahaki is an old wife’s tale,” Lorenz says waspishly before shaking his head and smiling in his small, earnest way. “But it is not fatal. At least we may take some comfort in that.”
Ferdinand nods. He continues coughing up leaves and, as his assignment period at the Bridge comes to an end and he prepares to depart for Enbarr, longer stems. The stems are a bit unpleasant as he has to pull them fully from his throat, but they are smooth and not the thorny symbols of the tragic operas and plays he grew up on.
Hanahaki disease is not fatal.
Ferdinand turns the stem over between his forefinger and thumb. The leaves are healthy, green, and vibrant. He retrieves his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the leaves down until they seem to shine.
He has a vase on his windowsill, containing several wildflowers that grow along the Bridge’s walls. Carefully, he parts the flowers and inserts the stem between them. The leaves nestle among the blossoms, looking not at all out of place.
Ferdinand, feeling rather whimsical, smiles.
two.
Edelgard wants to have the reunion at Garreg Mach for the Millennium Festival. Even after five years, she still holds onto hope that Byleth, who has been missing since the start of the war and was last seen falling down the deep, seemingly bottomless ravine that now divides the land of Garreg Mach from Varley, is alive. Edelgard will enter the ruins of the monastery alone, and the Black Eagles Strike Force will follow later.
“This is an ill-advised plan,” Ferdinand says when Hubert and Randolph tell him this in the sole private area of Enbarr: the Imperial Baths.
Hubert and Randolph exchange glances. Hubert looks down into the bath, scowling. Randolph looks to Ferdinand, steam rising up from the water around them.
“It is the Emperor’s will,” he says, clearly thinking it is a stupid plan, too.
Ferdinand would likely have said something unkind, but he coughs instead. Caught unaware, the leaf and its short stem shoot out of his mouth and plop without ceremony atop the water. Both Hubert and Randolph gauwk. Ferdinand grimaces and reaches out to take the leaf and flick it out of the bath.
“What –” Randolph starts, staring at Ferdinand as if he had grown a second head instead of coughing up a rather nice leaf.
“Hanahaki?” Hubert asks, brows furrowing deeply as his gaze follows the leaf out of the bath.
“Presumably,” Ferdinand says, feeling rather annoyed. “I think Edelgard’s plan is based upon emotional motivations and is not in the good interest of her station.”
Randolph’s mouth opens and closes, rather similar to Lorenz’s initial reaction. Hubert looks at Ferdinand with an expression not unlike he has swallowed an incredibly sour lemon.
Ferdinand coughs. This time, he is able to catch the leaf in the palm of his hand. It has a slightly longer stem, and he inspects it briefly before setting it outside of the bath.
Randolph opens his mouth.
“It is the Emperor’s will,” Hubert says, in the tone he always uses when he wants to both end a discussion and move on. “We must discuss the best way to capture Garreg Mach Monastery once and for all. It has been contested ground for far too long.”
The ground had not settled for four years after the initial chaos, and, since then, Imperial Forces have been embroiled with unrest in the northwest of Adrestia and the always unstable situation on the Hyrm and Gloucester borders. The Kingdom, too, is an ever present worry with the rebel fractions, but they lack solid leadership. This would all change drastically if Adrestia could establish a stronghold in the centrally located Garreg Mach Monastery, but it also risks stretching their forces too thin. There is also the matter of the rogues and bandits who have taken advantage of the instability of the mountains to run amok.
Edelgard’s motivations to honour the promised reunion may be emotional, but there is a need for Adrestia to at least have a hold on Garreg Mach for its geographical benefits, if nothing else.
“Taking Garreg Mach as a central Fódlan base is not without merit,” Ferdinand says, and then promptly coughs up a stem with four beautiful leaves; he throws it out of the bath in annoyance. “Let’s finish up here and get to the war table.”
“Yes,” Randolph says because he’s finally caught on that Ferdinand does not want to discuss the plant matter.
Hubert nods. Ferdinand would have thought that he would leave it alone if he hadn’t caught Hubert staring at the last stem and its leaves as they depart the baths.
Ferdinand, not for the first time regarding Hubert, is filled with dread.
In the famous 992 opera, Cichol’s Star and Staff, Saint Cichol falls in love with a woman from Albinea, who appears to him in the surf of the Rhodes Coast. He suffers from hanahaki disease, coughing up sea kale and rosemary, as his attempts to court the mysterious woman are continuously rejected. At the climax of the opera, he presents her with armfuls of the plants as proof of his love, and this desperate gesture finally reaches her. The opera is unique for its very human portrayal of a saint and the positive portrayal of a foreign lover.
Since returning to Enbarr, Ferdinand finds himself coughing up leaves and stems more regularly. The rumours from the Bridge make their way to Enbarr and grow more heads because people think they know him better here.
“Maybe it’s Count Gloucester’s son,” Ferdinand overhears a stablehand whispering.
“But he’s very handsome,” he overhears a couple of dancers for the evening’s entertainment murmuring, not realising Ferdinand is sitting in the public seating that is close to the right side of the stage. “Why would his love be unrequited?”
“I bet it’s the Margrave Edmund’s daughter,” a former Garreg Mach monk who now works in the Enbarr archives says, two stacks away from where Ferdinand is seated at a map of Nuvelle. “I saw them talking in the stables…”
Ferdinand grits his teeth. He is not in love with Marianne, and he knows nothing of what has happened to her since the start of the war. Margrave Edmund holds the ultra-religious north and has made his disagreement with Edelgard’s treatise on the dissolution of the Church of Seiros irrevocably clear. Ferdinand imagines if he was in love with Marianne, he would be pulling whatever the plant growing in his lungs out by the handfuls rather than accidentally coughing bits and pieces.
“It doesn’t cause you any pain?” Randolph asks as he, Edelgard, Ladislava, and Hubert share a late lunch with Ferdinand after a very long strategy meeting.
“No,” Ferdinand says, placing the two leaves he coughed into his palm into his handkerchief and folding it up to tuck away. “It’s just a bit inconvenient. I am glad I did not start on this while on a covert assignment.”
Randolph and Ladislava nod sagely. Hubert scowls deeply, which he has been doing rather frequently since Ferdinand returned from the Bridge. Edelgard swallows her mouthful of roasted vegetables.
“Do you find the rumour mill to be troublesome?” she asks, frowning at Ferdinand in that particular way that he has only recently realised is concern and not annoyance.
“No,” Ferdinand says, and he smiles, feeling rather cheered. “No one is saying anything untoward, and I can imagine that this must be a very rich yet benign topic for speculation.”
“It’s not every day a disease more common in fiction than reality affects a public figure,” Hubert says, clearly irritated.
“Yes,” Ferdinand agrees, not understanding Hubert’s mood at all.
Secretly, as he places the stems with their sweet, healthy leaves in the vase in his bedroom in the barracks of Castle Hresvelg at the end of the long workday, Ferdinand wonders if he actually has hanahaki. He still has not seen a bud or a blossom, and the leaves and stems themselves are not readily identifiable as a singular species. This could be some other affliction, especially because he cannot say if he is even in love.
In the moonlight, the green leaves and supple stems shine.
three.
In the Red Wolf Moon, the weather takes a turn for the worst.
Ferdinand returns to Aegir just before the beginning of the month because there was an explosion at the tannery. By the time he rides back to Enbarr, feeling angry with his father, who was utterly useless and more wrapped up in his ills than ever, the roads have turned to mud where they are unpaved and the cobblestones are slick and dangerous. Ferdinand arrives back within the city walls soaked to the bone and in such low spirits that he sends a messenger to notify Edelgard of his return rather than appearing himself. He bathes in the common baths and is given a wide berth as he soaks for longer than necessary before he retires to his room.
His feet ache, and his skin has a rash from the rain soaking down into his clothes. That is his excuse for shirking his duties.
Ferdinand is detangling his hair with a fine toothed comb when someone knocks on his door. He allows himself a moment of annoyance, grimacing at his damp image in the mirror. He is dressed in his nightgown and socks, and his housecoat is nowhere near what he would term as presentable, but he is the scion of his family and a General in the Imperial Forces. His father’s uselessness leaves him no leeway.
“It is unlocked,” Ferdinand calls, teasing at the knots in the ends of his hair. “You may enter.”
The door opens. Hubert lets himself in, still dressed as if it is day and therefore likely working in the shadows for the night. He looks over Ferdinand, who shifts to face him on the dressing bench. Hubert’s gaze levels, and he frowns.
“Good evening, Ferdinand,” he says, unimpressed.
“Good evening, Hubert,” Ferdinand says even though calling it good makes it something of a lie; politeness does sometimes have this side effect. “You are working late.”
Hubert’s frown softens slightly. Ferdinand coughs, and, since his hands are occupied, the leaf shoots in front of him and lands between his feet and Hubert’s boots. Ferdinand feels his face screw up in annoyance before he can stop himself.
“Apologies –”
“There is no need,” Hubert says, and he leans down to pick up the saliva-covered leaf between his gloved fingers; he straightens and then stares at the leaf, clearly having acted unconsciously and now faced with the awkward realisation he doesn’t know what to do with the leaf. “Should I…”
“Just set it here,” Ferdinand says, motioning with the comb to the dressing table where he has his hairbrush and oil out. “You may use my towel.”
Hubert stares down at the leaf. His hand. His expression is odd, not unkind and a deep crease between his hairless brows.
“You don’t want my hand on your towel,” he says after the silence stretches just enough to become strange.
Perhaps not. Ferdinand runs the comb through the handful of his hair and doesn’t catch on anymore knots. He lets his hair go and sets the comb on the table, reaching for his hairbrush. He watches Hubert stare at the leaf.
“What did you need from me?” Ferdinand asks because he is tired and, while he does not dislike Hubert as he once did, he would rather continue preparing for bed.
Hubert visibly shakes himself. He looks at Ferdinand with another mighty frown, but the intensity of the expression is not due to Ferdinand.
“I am concerned about the Garreg Mach operation.”
Ferdinand, running his brush through his hair, sighs. “Yes,” he says because Hubert likely harbours the same trepidations that Ferdinand does about Edelgard’s insistence that she go alone into the ruins of the monastery. “Sit down. Let us speak.”
They talk about logistics for over an hour. Ferdinand coughs up a particularly well-developed stem as they consider the viability of either of them following Edelgard in secret, and he has to stop the conversation as he pulls it from his trachea. It’s a very unpleasant sensation, and Ferdinand would estimate that it is the largest piece of plant matter he’s expelled yet. He can’t help but examine the stem, which is as long as the tip of his middle finger to the base of his palm.
Hubert, seated at Ferdinand’s desk, is very quiet as Ferdinand adds it to the small pile of leaves on the dressing table.
“Do you have…” Ferdinand starts to ask, turning again to Hubert only to find that not only has he gone pale but his hands have curled into fists over his thighs. “Hubert?”
“I don’t understand how you can go about business as usual,” Hubert says, and the words exit him in the manner words do when the speaker has no control over them. “You are in pain.”
Ferdinand sits. Hubert swallows. He does not try to take his words back. Ferdinand does not know if he can deny them and be truthful. Ferdinand is in pain. He just isn’t sure why. Hubert, somehow, seems to know that.
In the light of the kerosene desk lamp:
They look at each other as if they are meeting for the first time.
four.
There is an old saying that some prefer dango to flowers.
Ferdinand is like that. He likes things that have a clear and necessary function more than decorative items. It is why he likes armour, tea, and weapons, and it is why he loves to read historical documents to understand better why things are as they are. It is why his father, who should have served Adrestia and Aegir’s best interests, is such a personal insult.
Hubert is like the spicy fish dango he likes to snack on: he is a person who lives and breathes his profession and station in life. As Edelgard’s shadow hand, he is faultless, even though Ferdinand often disagrees with his underhanded methods. Hubert is impossible to sway from his path, and he walks it with good and evil in each hand.
But Edelgard is not like them.
“I will not make concessions on this,” she says as Ferdinand clenches his fists on the war table and Hubert scowls so darkly the sky, already full of storm clouds, could explode. “I will enter the monastery on my own. It is the least risk, especially if the Professor is not there when I arrive and I must wait out the dawn.”
Ferdinand sits with Hubert later that afternoon over tea. Hubert eats his dango like it has all the answers in the world. Ferdinand coughs up leaves with short stems and holds his teacup between his palms. Hubert’s coffee, brewed so black it has become tar, grows cold.
“She will not be moved,” Ferdinand says at length, pushing his small pile of plant debris on the tabletop.
Hubert chews. The dango is out of season. The stormy, bone-chilling weather outside Ferdinand’s bedroom window is also unseasonal. Ferdinand can imagine how the autumn harvest is drowning on Gronder Field. They barely have enough wheat and barley to get through the rest of the year. Famine is on the horizon.
“No,” Hubert says, soft and low and in that particular way that Ferdinand feels the desire to reach out and clasp his shoulder in reassurance.
Instead, Ferdinand coughs. It’s more of a hack than his usual chest convulsion, and he claps his right palm over his mouth. Plant matter exits his mouth. Presses into the palm of his hand, more than ever has come up before. He coughs again, more needing to come up. It’s stuck in his throat. Ferdinand steels himself, twists his fingers to gain a purchase on the contents in his mouth, and pulls.
Leaves on stems that connect to a thick, rich main stem and bits of roots come up. Ferdinand drops the fully formed plant on the tabletop and coughs dry into his fist. His chest feels strange. The sensation of pulling that all up has filled his eyes with tears. Not from pain but discomfort.
“Ferdinand,” Hubert’s voice filters through, and it carries concern and, horrifyingly, a note of upset. “Wait. Let me get you some water.”
Ferdinand nods. He gropes around on himself for his handkerchief, and when he unfolds it, several leaves fall onto his lap. He wipes his eyes, strangely furious with himself. This is stupid. Inconvenient and stupid.
“Here,” Hubert says, and he sets a cup of water from the pitcher Ferdinand always keeps on the windowsill next to his decorative flowers.
“Thanks,” Ferdinand croaks before taking the cup and gulping it down.
Hubert lingers. He is close enough that Ferdinand can feel his body heat. It makes him realise that his bedroom is quite chilly.
“I understand now,” Hubert says, slowly.
His tone is so serious that Ferdinand looks up at him even though he is still blinking tears out of his eyes. Hubert gazes down at him with a strained but otherwise unreadable expression. He looks like he is about to explode. Or implode.
“You care deeply for Her Majesty.”
Ferdinand freezes. Hubert’s jaw muscles move. His hands do not clench, but he has never been given to so many physical tells.
“I am sorry,” Hubert says, and he means it; his eyes are full of shame. “I misjudged you. You have ever been our ally.”
You misunderstand, Ferdinand wants to say, but when he parts his lips, two little leaves fall from them, forcing himself to shut his mouth again in mortification.
“I will try to talk sense to Her Majesty,” Hubert says, and he bows to Ferdinand, who wants to scream as his lungs, throat, and mouth just fill with more plants. “Thank you, Ferdinand, for your honesty. I hope one day you may forgive me.”
No, Ferdinand wants to scream, but Hubert is already leaving, and Ferdinand hacks up roots and stems and tiny, white-pink flowers in despair because he finally understands:
I love you!
five.
Edelgard does not love Ferdinand. She makes this loud and clear when Hubert barges into a meeting with the Enbarr Port Authority, and therefore everyone in Enbarr knows about the cause for Ferdinand’s hanahaki within an hour. Hubert, embarrassed and having made a complete idiot of himself, promptly makes his presence scarce from Enbarr with some pertinent and very necessary personal liaison to the Barony of Ochs.
Ferdinand, once he stops filling his bedroom with blossoming plants and receives this notification from a doe-eyed Manuela, screams his inarticulate rage to the Red Wolf Moon.
six.
The worst part of hanahaki, Ferdinand has concluded, is not the tragedy of love scorned as the operas led him to believe but how horribly sentimental it has turned everyone around him.
Edelgard is incredibly embarrassed because of how poorly she took the news, and Ferdinand cannot clear up the misunderstanding because he cannot mention Hubert without coughing up fully formed plants. They communicate primarily through letters that Manuela, Hanneman, and Dorothea ferry back and forth between them. Ferdinand cannot put that his object of affection is Hubert in writing because that would too easily be used against all of them.
“Sucks, doesn’t it?” Caspar says when he and Ferdinand encounter each other in the training yard, very early in the morning. “I never really took you for a guy into the unobtainable.”
“You’re not wrong,” Ferdinand grumbles, and Caspar pats him on the back like he actually understands the situation.
“It is very sad,” Dorothea comments as she sits with Ferdinand for tea while the wind howls outside of the opera. “I should have caught on that you were only pulling El’s pigtails back at the monastery.”
“That is not for you to blame yourself,” Ferdinand says, feeling very tired. “We were not friends back then.”
“Love is difficult,” Hanneman says on a stormy evening as he brings Ferdinand a pile of grim agricultural reports.
“I suppose it is,” Ferdinand says, staring down at the damning numbers of lost wheat crops due to flooding west of Gronder.
Hanneman is uncharacteristically quiet. Ferdinand looks up. Hanneman gazes at him with thin lips and over-focused eyes. It makes the fine hair on the back of Ferdinand’s neck stand up.
“I had a sister,” he says, and Ferdinand sets the papers down because he has never heard Hanneman speak of the past. “She was used as a pawn in this world, and I could do nothing but watch her suffer for the scraps of love thrown to her.”
Ferdinand swallows. He knows Hanneman’s family line. As a little boy, he memorised the family trees of noble families and their branch families sitting on his father’s lap. He knows that Hanneman’s family line is ending because he has not produced children and none of the offspring of his deceased sister bore it. Upon Hanneman’s death, the line of Essar is ended. The Crest of Indech will only exist in the Varley line, which gives Count Varley far too much power.
“You should tell this to Bernadetta,” Ferdinand says as his window rattles against a barrage of torrential rain. “She needs your insight and strength more than I do.”
“My sister would have given me the same insight,” Hanneman says.
He is still looking at Ferdinand as if he is a ghost. Perhaps Ferdinand is. They come from a world of stories filled with magic, beauty, and horrific truths. It is enchanter’s nightshade growing in Ferdinand’s lungs.
Hanneman lifts his hand. Reaches out. He squeezes Ferdinand’s bicep in the short space between his armour. His hand is very warm.
“I will tell you what I wish I had been able to tell her.”
It occurs to Ferdinand that not even his parents have touched him like this since he was small enough to fit on their laps. There is no way he could have understood he was falling in love with Hubert.
“You are loved.”
Not until it was too late.
seven.
Ferdinand is not gifted with growing things.
He loves the natural world, from decorative plants to staple crops to the massive trees that grow in the far northeast. He always wanted to be able to grow flowers to please himself, or to grow herbs for medicine, but plants inevitably withered under his care, even if he followed all the advice and guidance of seasoned farmers and horticulturists. He had thought he would content himself with his ability to help rear animals and make up for his black thumb by understanding how best to utilise the land to support his people.
It makes a twisted sort of sense, he thinks when word comes by a mage messenger that Hubert has returned to Enbarr, that he fell in love without realising the root nor conscious longing to give shape to the flower. He came to love Hubert by way of growing respect for his work ethic and his particular brand of loyalty to Edelgard. He loves Hubert through that respect, founded upon bits and pieces, and it took him a terribly long time to come to love Hubert as a whole person. By now, the roots of his lovesickness run so deep that Ferdinand’s words, his greatest weapon, are fated to be choked and strangled before they can reach his tongue.
“Are you angry with him?” Edelgard asks after the mage leaves and Ferdinand has been uncharacteristically silent.
Her words are without judgement. She has suffered from the hasty way Hubert attempted to solve Ferdinand’s hanahaki, since everyone assumes that Ferdinand is pining after her. Ferdinand senses that she has some doubts about this assumption, but she hasn’t pried, focused upon the upcoming operation at Garreg Mach and maintaining a professional relationship with Ferdinand in place of making more trouble for both of them. It is a very admirable and, Ferdinand privately thinks, noble approach.
“No,” Ferdinand says, and pink-white petals fall out of his mouth.
“Oh,” Edelgard says, low, like a gust of forgotten summer wind.
She looks at him, and, for a moment, they understand each other. Edelgard’s right hand twitches towards the petals that have pooled on the war table, but she stills herself almost as quickly. There are eyes in the walls and ears behind the tapestries. Her lips purse, and Ferdinand understands the cold fire in her eyes is not directed towards him.
It’s for him.
Edelgard shifts. Widens her centre of gravity. The stance she takes when wielding Amyr.
I will fight for you, his Emperor is saying without words; Edelgard speaks through pure action. Do I have your permission?
Ferdinand blinks. He feels suddenly as he did when Byleth offered him counsel back in those bygone academy days. It was the first time in so very long that he hadn’t felt alone. Maybe if things had been different, if Edelgard was not his Emperor, and Ferdinand was not her Prime Minister in all but title, he could have loved her like everyone else has unfortunately assumed.
A noble fights to protect their people and to enable them to grow, love, and flourish.
Ferdinand presses his right hand to his breast and bows. After a brief moment, Edelgard turns and walks out of the room. Ferdinand remains bowed until he can no longer hear her even, exacting heels on the tiled floor. He begins the process of carefully tidying the war room up.
He leaves the flower petals where they fell.
eight.
Hubert invites Ferdinand to tea.
This is not what Ferdinand expected. The invite comes by way of a written invitation, which Hubert has never done, and the paper is on his business stationary, which Ferdinand has only ever seen when Hubert intends to end someone’s career. Hubert does seem to have some awareness of how threatening this invitation could be and has written a short explanation for the stationary on the invite: he has run out of any other serviceable writing paper.
He could have just sent scratch paper. Ferdinand regularly sends memos on the bits of scratch that he has lying about for managing his armour collection.
“Perhaps he means it as an apology,” Linhardt comments because the invitation arrives as they happen to be in the castle library, sitting across from each other at the large study table.
“Pardon?” Ferdinand says, completely taken aback that Linhardt of all people is speculating upon someone else’s social motives.
“Well,” Linhardt says, very slowly and on the tailend of a yawn, “Hubert did rather muck things up for you and Edelgard. I haven’t known peace since your unrequited love became the talk of the Empire.”
“Thank you for your input,” Ferdinand says, feeling distinctly ungrateful.
This cannot continue, no matter what Hubert currently believes. Ferdinand accepts the invitation, pulling out a whole enchanter’s nightshade plant from his gullet in the process of writing the short message. After a moment, he sends the plant along with Hubert’s mage messenger, a rather petty gesture that satisfies him rather too much. The mage is thankfully masked and makes no comment, and Linhardt has gone to sleep in the interim. Ferdinand finishes his analysis of historical rainfall for the past fifty years in the remaining candlelight before retiring to bed.
Tea time with Hubert has, over the course of the war, become a semi-regular event that Ferdinand looks forward to. The dread and trepidation that fills his stomach as he prepares for this encounter takes him back to their earliest soirées when they did not know each other much better than they had in their aborted academy days. They began to have tea and coffee together specifically because they worked together so poorly, and it was having a noticeably negative effect upon morale. Those early times were spent in halting conversation that often caused even Ferdinand’s favourite tea to taste acrid.
But, Ferdinand reflects as he tosses several leaves and root bits into his bin, it is from those meetings, which they both dedicated themselves to for the betterment of everyone else, that he likely began to fall in love with Hubert. It’s rather like one of the plays that his father used to like, which were based around court intrigue and subterfuge. Ferdinand hadn’t cared for those because oftentimes the characters were very mean-spirited and motivations were always inherently selfish, but the stories and the commentary upon politics and society were always pertinent.
“Perhaps I should tell you,” Ferdinand says as Hubert opens his study’s door to welcome him for tea, “that you are like a satirical comedy’s protagonist.”
Hubert, whose lips had just begun to part in greeting, gapes briefly before he frowns, his nose wrinkling as if Ferdinand is pulling a stinkweed from his mouth and not three nightshade blossoms. “I cannot appreciate this comparison,” he says, stepping aside to let Ferdinand in.
Ferdinand would have responded with something quite smart, but his attention is immediately captured by the vase on the tea table. The enchanter’s nightshade that he had sent with the messenger is in it, and the dainty white-pink flowers seem to preen among the tea, coffee, and a plate of Edelgard’s favourite lemon biscuits. Ferdinand’s throat burns.
“Ah,” he breathes, and leaves fall from his lips.
He looks down at them as they land upon his boots and the bare stone floor. Next to him, Hubert shifts.
“I will,” he says, rather haltingly, “cut to the chase.”
I would rather you not say it to me, Ferdinand thinks.
Hubert, none too discreetly, coughs.
Ferdinand’s head snaps up. Hubert pulls his hand away from its cupped position below his chin. In his palm, there are two just opened white rose buds in his palm. Ferdinand stares at them.
In the ancient flower languages, the bud of white rose signals a heart ignorant of love. The enchanter’s nightshade represents witchery and sorcery.
“I…” Hubert starts and Ferdinand tears his eyes away from the buds to look upon his face; he finds flushed skin, blotchy and uncomely; Ferdinand has never seen Hubert so beautiful. “I have been unkind, I think. To keep this secret.”
It dawns on Ferdinand suddenly, and he moves to the tea table. He lifts the lid on the pot. The rosebud tea that he’s drunk with Hubert for the past two years almost exclusively is nearly perfectly brewed. The buds are very obviously the same as Hubert’s hanahaki.
“Goddess,” Ferdinand breathes.
“I don’t think She has anything to do with this,” Hubert grumbles, and he crosses over to stand next to Ferdinand as he sets the lid back on the pot.
“You should have told me!” Ferdinand says, and Hubert winces slightly because he was very loud. “How could I have missed it –”
“I have been taking cough suppressants,” is Hubert’s absolutely infuriating response; he smiles a little at the apocalyptic expression Ferdinand likely wears. “It does not disturb the taste of coffee.”
“I swear,” Ferdinand says, and he grasps Hubert’s collar because he is going mad, “you are the most exasperating person I have ever known.”
Hubert smiles, all teeth and red gums. Ferdinand wants to headbutt him.
“Same to you,” Hubert agrees.
The kiss that they share and the breath they take together are clear and clean. Hubert sighs, deep and warm. Ferdinand, half-screaming, grips Hubert and feels, for the first time in months, that he is whole.
epilogue.
The tea and coffee become desperately, gloriously over-brewed.