Chapter Text
When Ferdinand was small, much too old to be chewing up flowers like the sterner servants claimed, his mother summoned a doctor to the von Aegir estate. He doesn't remember much of the visit - how could he? he was a child. - but somehow, the doctor's voice, explaining the ailment to his mother, still echoes in his head.
"It's the Hanahaki Disease." they said, voice solemn. "A sign of an unrequited love. Though I don't often see cases of it in children..."
His mother had pet his hair then, each stroke over his well-kept orange hair a whisper of poor, poor Ferdinand, to already have your heart scorned when you've yet to understand what that means. And the doctor continued, explaining that there was no real need to worry, the petals should stop appearing in time, really, how peculiar for him to be coughing them up at such a young age. It wasn't the answer his mother had been looking for, clearly, but the doctor was sent on his way without a fuss and life continued as normal.
But the disease never subsided. Ferdinand turned nine, twelve, seventeen, eighteen, and still the flowers (carnations, roses, and a few others he's not as familiar with) plagued him, slick with spit as they fall from his lips. They're mostly a deep, crimson red, but on occasion a pale purple or white petal appears in the slimy mix.
Ferdinand doesn't love Edelgard - or, at least, not in the way the Hanahaki Disease implies he should. But the flowers are undoubtedly a symbol of her: pale purple for her eyes, sharp and ever focused, white for her hair, cascading elegantly down her back and shoulders, and red for the Adrestian Empire itself, and the Hresvelg blood that runs thick in her veins.
The day Ferdinand receives the news of Edelgard's ascension and his father's deposition, he coughs up an entire rose. Its thorns, grown for self-defense, cut his throat and tongue as he doubles over, hacking and wheezing, lungs screaming for air.
Though his blood and saliva clings to the flower that rests (deceptively) delicately in the palm of his hand, he can still tell its color.
Red, the color that accents her armor when she lays siege to Garreg Mach.