[ FLOWER ARRANGEMENT ] - No matter how many flowers you gather, your bouquet won't look its best unless you have the skill to make it so. A couple of students have taken upon itself to imbue their peers with the knowledge of flower language and the art of flower arrangement, and as a result the garden has become something of a workshop.
(aka what if you got a flower that was SO fitting to you and they gave me the flowers named after your dad and my nemesis—)
He knew very little about flowers, or their language. The farthest Diamant's knowledge went were lilies and roses, maybe daisies. Alfred and the others from Firene always carried an abundance of blooms on their person, but the Brodian never thought much of them beyond their beauty, and how such things were unsuited to one like him, forged in fire and warfare.
His finger traces the edge of the hyacinth in his bouquet, and as he often found himself doing with Ivy, he voices his inner thoughts easily, without prompting.
"I know there's a language to flowers. But it never occurred to me that these... hyacinths... had meaning. Or that they were even flowers." Just a man. A man who took something precious from him, yet was dear to the person of his heart—a man he found sad and pitiful, hardly even worth his rage anymore.
"Could you tell me what they mean?"
He meant everything. He was a man who loved and raised her. Who was once her heart.
Fate, Ivy finds, has something of a sense of humor. She wonders what small twist upon the loom of destiny could have led to this—a rose for Ivy, and a hyacinth for Diamant.
A small, sad smile touches Ivy’s lips as she looks at the flower in his hands, at the way his fingers carefully trace the edges of the blue petals. So gentle, so reverent, it is hard to think that once he rallied to kill the man who bore this flower’s name.
“It is easy to forget,” she agrees, “I never thought of the word to be anything more than my father’s name.”
She still does. As a girl, she found it hard to believe that her father had been named for the blossoms and not the other way around. In the golden light of her youthful memories, he was the sort of man eras were named after, nevermind flowers.
“I am not as versed in their meanings as I ought to be,” Ivy admits, a mite bashful. She had studied it a little, mostly at court and then a bit more at the academy, but her mind was set on other, grander pursuits. “But I remember the meaning of these easily enough, if only because they have my father’s name.”
She points. “Hycaniths can represent a myriad of different things. Jealousy and resentment, for one, so you’d best be wary if you ever receive a hyacinth of the golden variety.”
A teasing mirth dances in her eyes as she loops her arm through his, leaning her cheek against his shoulder. They are matching, she with the fur on her sleeves, him with the fur on his mantle. It is soft to the touch, and smells of him.
“White hyacinths represent thoughts of others in their purest form—well wishes, felicitations, that sort,” she continues, “pink ones symbolize joy, and blue ones like the ones you have there…”
She reaches out to pinch a petal. “...mean sincerity, loyalty, and and fidelity. Fitting for you, isn’t it? I do not think anyone else more loyal and sincere than you, Diamant.”
She leans against him more. “Though the meaning that will never leave me is of which purple hyacinths represent. Forgiveness.”
Her father had so favored purple. It was in the clothes he wore, the strands of her mother’s hair, in the covers of books he’d give to Ivy and the ribbons he’d give to Hortensia. So many wrongs done, it is almost incomprehensible.
She turns up to look at Diamant. “Though surely you know what roses mean?”
