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There is something about an Empress spending most of her free time in the gardens making crowns out of flowers and blossoms that make advisors (High Overseer included) and the Spymaster frown and shake their heads.
While Dunwall is, admittedly, very much a monarchy, they haven’t taken crowns as symbols of power for centuries. Her father, the Emperor before her, hadn’t been like this. Of course, he’d been too caught up in the affairs of the Empire to actually, err—well, do anything that seemed even remotely leisurely, but this sort of behaviour is not encouraged.
An Empress must be proper, of course. Gallivanting about in the gardens picking flowers with her Lord Protector and getting dirt and petals on the lapels and skirts of her clothes is hardly proper conduct. She always apologises while handing the outfit to her tailors and dressmakers. The damage is never irreversible, though the advisors seem to disagree rather heartily.
She’s one of the best rulers the Empire has seen in centuries.
No one complains.
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It is only natural that the Empress’s daughter picks this up as well.
And this time, it is her tutors that shake their heads and groan when she goes missing again, only to find her in the gardens, laughing to herself as she plucks wild violets or daisies and completely unaware that they are weeds.
The gardeners adore her, her teachers less so.
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Now the two of them spend time in the gardens. The Empress teaches her daughter how to bend the stalks of daisies to form crowns, while the Lord Protector stands a polite distance away, gazing upon them with fond eyes.
Under her mother’s guidance, she learns to make dainty baby’s breath crowns and heavy red rose ones. She’s a fast and eager learner, and her mother is glad to teach her all she knows. Mistakes are made, of course. She cuts a finger on a rose thorn, and almost immediately, the Lord Protector steps forward, white handkerchief dwarfed by a large palm. She accepts it with a laugh; the Empress only smiles gently, looking at the Lord Protector in a way that only later will her daughter recognise as love.
At the end of the day, the Empress’ daughter hands her mother and the Lord Protector their own flower crowns. They accept it with solemn looks on their faces—almost a crowning ceremony, if you think about it—but can’t help bursting out into laughter when they are given the crowns. Made of jasmine and freesia respectively, the crowns aren’t very well-made, with petals drifting out of the circles of wire and crooked stems. It doesn’t matter to the both of them.
The Empress laughs, wide and open, love and joy expressed wholeheartedly in her expression. You’ll never see her like this anywhere else.
The Lord Protector covers his mouth to hide his smile, but the soft gaze in his eyes gives away everything.
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Later that night, the Empress slips a chain of whale-oil blue forget-me-nots into her Lord Protector’s hand.
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There are no flowers at the Golden Cat, save from admirers and Madam Prudence’s customers. They shout at her when she asks for them, with trembling fingers shoved firmly into the pockets of her coat.
She doesn’t like it here.
When is Corvo coming?
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The Hound Pits Pub is much, much better.
She finds a clump of wild violets one day, and Piero (rather grudgingly) hands her a length of copper wire. Corvo is still out doing Outsider-knows-what, and the Admiral won’t tell her where he is, so what else is a bored empress supposed to do?
As she works, she thinks. Her mind drifts to happier, warmer days, when the plague didn’t furrow her mother’s brow and when Corvo didn’t look so grim.
She crafts a delicate flower crown, taking care to weave the stems between the wires without crushing the petals until it looks just right.
She pretends not to notice the quiet tears on Corvo’s cheeks when he wraps her in a bear hug, because she is an empress, and a gracious one at that.