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Patience, Ponies, and Pastries

Summary:

Even when they took tea, rarer these days than ever, Hubert appeared utterly determined not to let Ferdinand see anything more than he already had. Frankly, Ferdinand wasn’t sure what else he could possibly dredge up from those impossibly inky depths that was worse than the oil slick he’d lived alongside for the past six years, but one didn’t catch a Fodlandy without patience and bait aplenty.


Six months after the end of the war, they all have their coping mechanisms. The Emperor tends to her garden, Ferdinand to his stables, and Hubert to his duties. It would all work perfectly, if Ferdinand could simply keep the oven door shut.

Notes:

A light-hearted break from the Tense Pining of the rest of this series, told halfway in letters traded among all the Black Eagles.

Alternatively, Hubert left the capital for a single month and look what happened. They've been bonding. Disgusting.

Alternatively, That Feeling when all your friends have found their place in the world, and you're still trapped in an awkward game of chicken with your fellow minister.

Chapter Text

My dearest Dorothea, surely shining radiant as ever,

You will not believe the rude treatment I have faced of late. Some of Hubert’s nasty minions actually collected all my scribbled ‘love’ letters to you, pasted the scraps together, and left them for me as a script! ‘So you don’t dither trying to remember your harebrained thoughts,’ Hubert explained. And laughed! I am not—forgetful! I simply refine every letter to an extent deserving of you, my dear.

Well. He will get his comeuppance sooner rather than later. There is to be an Almyran trade conference next month in Derdriu and he is slated to put in an unhappy appearance. Certainly she has said as much in her own letters to you, but allow me to reinforce exactly how desperate our Bernadetta is to extend her travels into Almyra. Rare plants, I expect. She has faced troubles on both ends, as Hubert is reluctant to send her so far beyond his, let us say, professional borders, and Claude is unwilling to extend a passbook to any noble without diplomatic concessions.

All of this for plants. Sketches of plants. They shall be a delight to frame in my parlor, but even so. Edelgard has backed the mad endeavor as long as Bernadetta will send back more whimsies for their carnivorous greenhouse. I have named it the Edelgarden, but so far no one has supported the measure aside from Byleth. You will join me in referring to it as such, won’t you? Surely a bastion of maneaters should have a misleadingly gentle name.

It appears that Linhardt and Caspar are en route to join Hubert at the conference, possibly as Bernadetta’s guard should the travels proceed east. I extended an invitation to Edelgard to run away with me to Brigid for a rival reunion of our own, but met with a swift veto. I shall work on my delivery.

(I must return to this: please my dear, do pause to picture Hubert’s mortification when Edelgard received and read aloud Claude’s missive. To be blackmailed so overtly over his favoritism for Bernadetta! I have never seen the man mottled so pale and red all at once. Edelgard has declined to memorialize the event in a portrait. Alas.)

On an unrelated note, that shall remain perfectly unrelated to anything else in this letter if you wish gifts to continue streaming across the ocean and into your lap: Do you recall when I made pastries for you? I have been considering a return to baking. Please provide a thorough review of my previous attempts.

Yours,

Ferdinand

 

P.S. I have noticed of late that your letters arrive to my desk still sealed. Funny that.




“Well,” Edelgard said delicately, pushing bits of charcoal around her plate with a fork. “If you’re trying to drive me to Brigid through starvation tactics, you’re making startling progress.”

“I should have fed them to the pigeons,” he groaned.

“Ferdinand, please don’t sell yourself short. Even the ants would pass these by.”

He couldn’t decide whether to laugh or to cry, and settled on swatting at her arm with a napkin. This was the third batch of pinwheels he’d massacred after giving up on five scone recipes and a supposedly foolproof shortbread just this week. Even his own impeccable confidence had to flounder at some point—but not quite yet. “As always, I thank you for your clarity.”

And for not telling Hubert, or I would be dead twice over for attempting to poison you.

Edelgard settled back and lifted her cup of tea to her lips, sighing through the steam. Her eyes drifted shut for a single moment of utter peace, and that was all it took for Ferdinand to shake off his frustration and reach for his own cup.

It was a delight, pure and simple and unimpeachable, to take breakfast tea with her every day they could manage. On clear mornings they would sit in the gardens and Edelgard would thread a bright blossom through his buttonhole before he set off for his duties. She took a certain aesthetic pleasure in having her right and left hand advisers in matching black, but couldn’t resist decorating him at every opportunity, as if his shock of fiery hair didn’t draw attention enough. Every calla lily, every iris, every sprig of lavender weighed down his shoulders in a devoted, flustered bow, and the whispers and giggles of staff and citizens followed him everywhere he went—and that, he had finally realized, was the point. Not deference, an offering of his well-founded pride at her altar, but the way shame stopped prickling at his spine and driving him to distraction, how he settled into his skin with every derisive comment, because none of it meant a damn to his honor and worth, yet a smile and a pocket full of posies meant the world.

Ferdinand had little doubt that Edelgard had calculated it as such, and as usual, her plan panned out. She’d never have offered him the position of Prime Minister if she didn’t know how to make him do a merry marionette’s jig. But she’d still missed the side effect dearest to him: the soft edges of her smile every time she leaned in to thread another stem through his buttonhole, behind his ear, into the plait of his hair. The harder the Prime Minister worked—well, all the ministers and staff, he wasn’t that self-centered, thank you—the less fell upon the Emperor’s endless plate, and the more time she could scavenge for her a life of her own. Not the goal of a minister’s work, certainly, but if Ferdinand privately considered it one of his many duties, no one could naysay him. He’d spent the war keeping an eye on all of their classmates, a sheepdog patrolling their haphazard flock, and if Edelgard now had to bear the brunt of it all, so be it.

Technically, their meetings were to discuss policy and ongoing reform efforts, not social matters. But to merely sit there with her, alive after everything, surrounded by such thriving vibrancy, settled Ferdinand’s heart like little else. Save the occasional afternoon coffee break, at least.

“You left the last batch on the heat too long.” Edelgard glanced back to the box of pinwheels, blackened on the bottom and the jam badly soured. “Much too long. Where on earth did your mind wander this time?”

He flushed a soft pink and reached for one of his failures, letting the burnt char shock his senses back in line. “In every direction.”

“Is this about Albinea? We have two weeks before the ambassador arrives. Or. Hm.” Edelgard sat back and folded her hands together on the table, surveying him for new weaknesses.

Ferdinand was not foolish enough to hang his head, but his heart sank with despair. Here it was. Once, after a particularly debilitating debate with count Hevring, Ferdinand had complained that his childhood oratory instructor had clearly been incompetent since Ferdinand had such pitiful grasp on all those infuriating little tricks the rest of them used. Leading questions, serpentine logic, all that wheeling and doubling-back to smack your opponent in the face with the incontrovertible truth of whatever they didn’t believe in. He’d hoped his colleagues would refer him to a book, some manual of verbal logic tricks that he could study. Or better yet, assuage his fears that arguing passionately from the heart wasn’t quite up to par.

Instead Edelgard and Hubert smiled at one another, slow as a seeping poison, and he knew to be afraid.

“Brigid?” she asked.

Yes, Brigid, like all of Petra’s comparisons to predator and prey. Ferdinand understood how this one worked, the way you circled around and hit closer and closer to home each time. He couldn’t scowl his way out or sit in silence as she veered into more dangerous territory, which she absolutely would. The only solution was to deflect to a matter of equivalent value.

“If you must know, Tisiphone is foaling next month. It will be her first, which is always more dangerous than—” He narrowed his eyes at Edelgard’s subtle head-tilt of confusion. “Hubert’s horse.”

“Ah. Yes.”

Ferdinand bristled, setting down his cup. If she weren’t the Emperor, he really would demand she bother to remember at least the names of the quartet of lovely mares that had brought her generals so many victories in the war. More accomplished than some humans, certainly. “Well. Hubert has only the one, and since he needs to travel for the conference, I have arranged to send my Eumenis along with him instead. He isn’t terribly fond of the beasts, you know. But my fine lady recognizes him and is too gracious to antagonize his sort. I expect he will complain regardless, as she stands a few hands higher than his usual mount, but she will bear any of his additional travel provisions admirably.”

“I can see how much thought you’ve given this.”

No, she couldn’t, because everyone left the horses up to him and blithely nodded along to whatever he said. Ferdinand carefully did not pout. He hadn’t even gone into the delicate business of arranging a stud from the Gloucester stables, nor how much goodwill the gift of a few well-bred foals would bring them with Lorenz. Nearly as complicated as arranging a marriage, he expected — Lorenz surely treated it as a matter of the same magnitude, with how prickly he became over letting his primary magehorse out of sight.

“However, it doesn’t account for the…”

“Treats.”

It visibly pained Edelgard to say it. “Treats.”

“Perhaps I wished to broaden my horizons.” Perhaps he wasn’t sleeping and needed something new to occupy his racing thoughts.

“Hm.” She took another pinwheel and broke it into its four individual daggers, as easily as she might dissect him under one steely glance. But her eyes were kind when she looked up, kinder than anything either had brought to the tea table in many weeks. “You can always discuss your concerns with me, Ferdinand. Even the ones we share.”

He gazed down into his teacup, swirling the fragrant dregs within. Which concerns, exactly, did they share? That Hubert hadn’t journeyed farther than a day’s ride away from them in well over three years, and his absence would ache into every shadow? That it left Ferdinand as her main retainer, defender if it came to that, and he was an all-around pitiful replacement? That they’d been fighting with Count Bergliez and Count Hevring over matters of the displaced Faerghus army for near on a month now, and with every argument they hacked expertly into Ferdinand’s legitimacy, revealing him for the decorative, impotent lapdog he feared to be? That Dorothea was an ocean away, instead of here, and Bernadetta was angling for the same, and sleep was already an unreliable ally, and even the stress baking was going miserably, and—

And two weeks ago Edelgard had offered him back the Dukedom of Aegir, and he still hadn’t said yes.

“…Thank you, my friend. Truly. But another cup of tea will do me enough wonders for today.”

Ferdinand knew his smile did not reach his eyes, but she was well-versed in smiles such as those. She would understand.

Indeed, Edelgard immediately took the teapot in hand and poured him another cup. Then she stood and carried it away with her, wandering off towards a less-cultivated area of the gardens. “Come see the new celosia blooms.”

“Edelgard!” He pushed away from the table in a hurry, more dismayed at the sight of her carrying away his perfectly steeped cup of vanilla bergamot—his own blend, that he’d devised to broaden her limited horizons!—than he cared to admit. “One does not simply hold another noble’s tea hostage—”

“Unless it is a hostage negotiation. In which case I find it surprisingly effective.” She waved the cup so dangerously over a bed of tulips that it nearly spilled.

“You need only invite me to see your…whatever they are!”

Edelgard stopped at once, holding the cup gingerly between her cupped hands with the delicate porcelain handle pointed his way. “And you need only invite me to see your stables,” she concluded smoothly. “Instead of sulking like a child. Was I meant to hear an opera monologue in the background? Alas, only the horses will understand my yearning soul!”

“Fair enough,” Ferdinand laughed, heart light for the first time in days. He didn’t take the cup, but spread his arms wide in adoration of the lilac bush aside him. “Ah, sweet blossoms, only you can perceive the heart I must hide from all the world! Only you shall receive the tender care I have always longed to—”

She upended the tea into the soil.




Ferdie,

This letter should reach you in time. Petra is so eager to send our trinkets along that she plans to bring it halfway herself on wyvern express. If it wouldn’t cause a border dispute, I expect she’d bring it further still.

Your regular allotment of tea leaves and coffee beans are enclosed, along with a new sample from our first Albinean shipment. Make sure to serve it when that ambassador visits. It shouldn’t take much effort on your end to reopen that trade route – those Albineans seem mostly concerned about regional stability and security. Redirect some of your restoration troops to a western port and they’ll be eating out of your hand. In the meantime, let me know if there are any other delicacies you’re pining for. Unless they’re living and breathing delicacies, in which case I believe you already have them there in Fodlan, so you’ll have to ensnare them on your own.

The seeds are for Bernie, please keep them dry while she’s on the road. Linhardt has the…colorful wiggly things? Petra said they’ll help his fishing. (Isn’t the point to fall asleep on the warm shore?) The coat is for Caspar. Let him know it’ll make him look exceptionally handsome on his Special Adventure Day. He’ll know what I’m talking about.

And make sure Edie writes me back, won’t you? I can never tell if she’s holding out on me, or if Hubie’s getting them ‘lost’ in the mail.

Now on to your question: I have a sweet tooth, so your treats were sufficient. I doubt the target of your renewed baking endeavors would appreciate such sugary delights. Petra’s chef jotted down some more appropriate recipes, attached. The mokatines are beyond your skill level so you’ll obviously attempt them anyway. I’ve included a box of specially ground coffee that will help.

On your unrelated note, both recipes should last on the road if one is journeying to, say, former Alliance territory.

Good luck (you’ll need it),

Dorothea

 

P.S. You’re breaking international espionage etiquette, my buzzy bee. Send more trashy novels and we won’t report you to headquarters.