after receiving their bouquets, linhardt tugs gently on caspar's hand - their usual signal to stop for a moment. they pull the two over to the side, out of the way of other partygoers, and pull a bloom from their bouquet before tucking the lot under their arm to continue their plan.
"you probably want to see how many flowers you can get right?" he says, breaking most of the stem off the tulip.
(the thought hits him, then, that an affirmative answer to his suggestion will see caspar away from his side for most of the night. he doesn't much like the idea of that, being caspar's date, but he can't bring himself to say it out loud.)
"this is an easy first, at least."
linhardt then tucks the bloom into the seam of caspar's jacket - a makeshift boutonniere, and a symbol that caspar and linhardt are matching. after all, they'd dressed appropriately without even speaking about it, so the flower seems like a nice touch.
"i don't know much about tulips, except for how a leicester county absolutely tanked their value from overproduction in a height of interest in the flowers," they begin, speaking like an offering, a way to spend time together. they hesitate, though, their face heating up as they continue. "i'm not sure if you really want to hear about all that tonight, though..."
“Hold on, let’s make it a fair trade.”
Retrieving his matching flower is easy, pinched between his fingers and plucked from the bunch. As he lifts it up to gift it, he realizes the complication is in the placement.
There’s no jacket seam for Caspar to tuck the stem into. The lace of Lin’s dress looks too delicate to shove anything through it, and he wouldn’t want to ruin it. As it is, the design sits so prettily over his skin. Lin’s collarbones draw a horizontal shape to connect the whole thing, making it easy to loop around and just keep looking for a while.
...Oh. He’s just kind of been looking for a while.
“You’ve got your Crest on your heart.” He says, dumbly, because it’s the best excuse he has. (He really did just notice it, at least.) “Uh, anyway…”
Lifted just a bit higher, the flower stem tucks nicely between similarly green strands of hair.
“What about the other flowers? All I know about lilies is that they’re bad for cats.”
And that they look nice on Linhardt. His tongue feels too big and stupid to make those words happen out loud right now, though.