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Ludwig the Holy Blade is a man who draws eyes to him: whispers, gloved hands clasped over the greatsword he draws in combat to protect his shining Church—someone who is infallible, a pegasus ascended from the remains of some serpentine beast. But Ludwig has eyes for only one lone soul, and one alone.
Which is why he finds himself near one rare patch of sunlit soil, the vegetables and watercolor palette’s worth of flowers white-gold in the afternoon. The young lady wipes at her dirt smeared face and spectacles, dark blue eyes gleaming with curiosity as to his plight.
“I—” Rosario stammers. “I’m flattered you’re asking me for advice, Sir Ludwig, but whatever’s the matter?”
“Let us turn our attention to some weeks ago…”
Vicar Laurence had requested he stop by his office that time—not for some tryst nor for discussion on how to manage that recent flowing of blood he deemed necessary. No, it had been to greet him on some lavender eve, with a bouquet of flowers clutched in his silken-gloved hands. Night convolvulus, Ludwig recognizes, tucking stray dark hair away and staring at the moonlight flower. And agrimony.
He accepted the bouquet and bent down to kiss Laurence’s hand—a show of respect, their secret code for affection. “Thank you, Vicar Laurence.”
Laurence smiled, as though blooming with satisfaction over some secret he did not want to tell.
“Why are you so stony in telling me the nature of yours and Vicar Laurence’s liaisons? It makes perfect sense.”
Ludwig raises an eyebrow—no dignity, not as he helps frail, blonde Rosario tend to her verdant patch of flora. “Pardon?”
“Forgive me, but I surely thought everyone knew you are in love.”
He never did understand all of the intricacies of what every soft, blushing petal meant. That was not a part of his education.
Yet when Ludwig left a single pink rose in his wake, he caught Laurence through the crack in his office door inhaling its delicate scent: bronze lashes on his closed lids casting shadows like lace just above his cheeks, fingers rotating the stem to observe it at every angle.
When he at last set the rose down, his brown eyes shone in tandem with a smile.
“A pink rose… well, I don’t see the trouble there.”
Rosario pats the dirt into the ground with calloused palms, bespectacled gaze brightening when she sees the scatterings of floral color in the wake of the water and sunlight they have been kissed with. Ludwig, for once, stands by as her loyal servant to yank weeds out whose leaves sprawl over soil to block out sun—her student, too, when he gives her a quiet look to prompt her to speak further.
“A single rose is a token of new love and admiration,” she declares, “which does still shock me, because I truly was under the impression that you had been courting Vicar Laurence for far longer.”
“...I see. Is there any meaning in the color pink?”
“There is, indeed—it signifies respect, far more gentlemanly than its more passionate red cousin. Since you mentioned how serene Vicar Laurence’s manner was, he certainly must have appreciated the compliment. You are his most loyal Hunter, a gallant knight who admires him for the path he has taken in order to provide Yharnam solace and help during darkest times. And if you have only recently begun to formally see one another, how could he not take that as a compliment?”
(As he pats over sun-warmed soil, Ludwig wonders just how many romance novels Rosario reads—her tone is a little too full of verve as she gushes over the lord-and-knight bond that he and Laurence share. And he has glimpsed more of the tangled dark roots and weeds growing underfoot of their shared Yharnam that is he is certain not everyone else is privy to. But he cannot help but nod at her earnestness in how she listens to him speak of his beloved.)
“As I mentioned, he seemed quite content when I passed by his office and saw him examining the rose,” Ludwig says.
“Then you must have done something right! He appreciated the message in all its simplicity. So far, your courting has been going quite smoothly. But you sought me out for assistance and advice—in which case, what is it that troubles you?”
I spent years studying the blade and how to hunt, yet I find myself confounded by flowers of all possible troubles.
The most recent bouquet had bold purple ipomoea and soft sprouts of pink mezereon. He noticed it laid upon his desk as shadows seeped in, tinged rosy by twilight’s cool fingers. Laurence would never leave notes that displayed his affection alongside the blooms he must have snipped fresh from the gardens or at least picked up from that flower shop down the street. Whatever it is, Ludwig cast his blue eyes upon it and took the bouquet, even through the caress of leather gloves he could still tell how soft those curved petals were.
It could not hurt to repay the gesture with something more extravagant; he had only been presenting Laurence with single flowers.
That was why come the next morning, he made his way through the hallways to present his Vicar with a bouquet of his own. He had gotten one of the Choir members to help him pluck flowers from the garden for it, watching them peel their gloves away to touch at loamy, sweet-smelling soil. Laurence accepted the bouquet surveying everything: from the faint tendrils of soft lavender, to the tiny blushing of London pride and meadow saffron, all swathed in rich, buttery orange-and-yellow of frilly marigolds. (And the marigolds he picked because they reminded him of that head of soft hair he so loved to run his fingers through—lit shimmering gold under sunlight, like illuminated maple leaf, like light-warmed copper.)
Laurence squinted down at the flowers, then up at Ludwig, and then back down at the flowers once more. “Thank… you?”
Of all expressions he expected to see from his beloved upon receiving a bouquet of flowers, bafflement was not among them.
“Ah, I think I see the trouble.” Rosario steps aside from her patch of garden, wiping her hands upon the navy of her skirt. “You aren’t all that well-acquainted with floriography and withal, are you?”
“No.”
“Because I… well, how harsh would you like me to be in this presumption?”
“Blunt. I know nothing about floriography.”
“Just about every single flower in that bouquet is the last sort of flower you would want to present someone trying to egg you on to propose to them.”
“What?”
“The ipomoea,” says Rosario, “is a declaration of attachment, while the mezereon is coquetry—in other words, Vicar Laurence is saying, ‘I am quite fond of you, perhaps you could present us with rings to match till death do us part?’”
A little afraid of exactly what he had communicated in that last bouquet, Ludwig urges, “...Go on.”
“Well—marigold stands for grief, lavender for distrust, London pride stands for frivolity and meadow saffron stands for ‘my best days are past.’ In other words, you just told Vicar Laurence, ‘I grieve for our broken trust, for you are a frivolous mess of a man—and my capability in more sensual matters is lacking.”
“Perhaps you could have been slightly less blunt about that last part.”
“You did ask me to be as blunt as I could, Sir Ludwig.”
He wishes in this moment he were nothing more than a mere spoil to be buried underneath the soil, only seen again when it blooms into a proper plant. All of those gestures of romance, those single blooms he had left as spoils of the garden in Laurence’s office—well, that had all been simple good luck.
Only the grandfather clock in the study acts as an indicator of the hour; the shadows cast upon the ornately-printed office walls are warped in signaling nighttime. Ludwig is hunched over his desk skimming through the frayed, yellowed pages of the book Rosario gave him, scanning over the ornate printed illustrations bleeding dark ink. There is always the more straightforward approach of simple apology through spoken word. But while Ludwig does not speak this language lifted up gently from the roots, Laurence does—and as such, he is determined to learn it.
Truth be told, he had been hoping for a moment like this for a while. Not for any extravagance nor fanfare; Ludwig has never been the type for that. But deep in a little blue velvet box, a thin gold band with a small pearl embedded against its surface sits swathed in a cushioning of black silk. It is a pearl he found at Yharnam’s shore when he cracked open an oyster one evening—not even the slightest bit eroded by saltwater nor sand, a perfect bloom from the watery depths beyond the fragile sanctum of their town. He had been saving it for the fairest flower of all.
In his searches he skims over the poem alongside it, from a Mrs. M. E. Hewitt.
She dwells amid the world’s dark ways,
Pure as in childhood’s hours;
And all her thoughts are poetry,
And all her words are flowers.
An ode to the garden daisy. This flower shall do.
And he finds Laurence not in the confines of his ornate office, but in hushed conversation with members of the Choir in the narrow corridor to the Cathedral Ward drenched in lamplight—those hummingbirds in phantasmagorical white drawn to new pollen. He is coy with them, squinting at every question, contemplative under the shroud of that milk-pale veil draped over him. They have played these little games for some time, Ludwig knows.
Their eyes meet. Laurence catches a glimpse of floral brightness tucked in between dark leather gloves and excuses himself with, “Pardon, but I have some private business to attend to with Sir Ludwig that has come up quite suddenly. Please, forgive my sudden departure—it’s quite urgent.”
It is in the closest modicum of privacy they have in a darkened corner that Laurence splays a hand upon Ludwig’s chest. He looks up with uncertainty, worry furrowing his red brow.
“Have you been faring well during these hazy times?” he asks. “I am well aware that you are a man who would rather you keep your most raw, vulnerable sentiments to yourself to confront, but—”
“Oh, Vicar Laurence, I think it’s only a misunderstanding.”
He reaches down to tuck away a lock of stray red hair, marveling at the glimmer of the crescent-moon earring Laurence wears. This is once again his area of expertise, when he extracts the bouquet he had been carrying around.
“I am not infallible. I was wrong to take your messages of affection at face value in all their beauty, and not learn—or even admit—the coded words with which you were trying to communicate to me with. It was only through one of my own apprentices that I learned what best to do.”
Ludwig draws forth the bouquet he had spent last night marking down the fine details of: soft sprigs of delicate mistletoe speckled with pale berries. Myrtle crowned with fuzz—not unlike the frothy veil of a newlywed bride. Pale daisy petals framing the crown of disk florets at their centers. Dark sprigs of hazel poised for resolution. Almost all of it in lacy marital white, the milky glimmer of that moon Ludwig turns to when his nights are full of solitude, the pearl embedded atop the ring he brought with him tonight.
“Perhaps in substitution of ceremony, you could accept this?”
Laurence scans the bouquet and then a rare smile dances onto his face: the sort Ludwig wakes up to in private when they lie beneath silken sheets in the cold hours of the early morning, with all of its crinkles and dimples that others are not so privy to. And his smile grows even wider when Ludwig moves away from his face to take his hand and slip that ring upon his gloved finger.
“I truly am sorry,” he answers, “I ought to have asked first. I wasn’t aware that the realm of floriography is more niche than I thought…”
“Your worries are for naught, Vicar Laurence. I’ve studied the error of my ways and realized what more I ought to do. Perhaps you can accept this as an apology, as well as a question I now understand you had been hoping that I would ask you for a long, long while.”
He is stunning in the robes he wears as a part of his duty, the very image of a starry night in these corridors. But that smile and pearl shine brightest of all when he examines the ring upon his finger and looks back up again. There is no triumphant kiss, or any other grand expression, only:
“I do.”