FicWad

She knew when he handed her the flower what he was saying, and her heart skipped a beat in her chest. She had sat with him in his lessons, had learned right alongside him. She, the straight-backed scholar who kept her (wide, nervous) eyes resolutely on the tutor while he drew pictures instead of diagrams and folded his lessons into tiny origami animals that all managed to find their way to her desk.

There were few subjects he complained about as vociferously as he had protested all the training in social graces. Dancing, etiquette, diplomacy... it didn't matter to him that these were necessary to his existence should he achieve his goal to become emperor, he just hated them. But one of the older boys in his clan (brothers, he called them, though they did not share a parentage) pointed out that all these things would be very useful when it came to courting girls, and she had done her best not to frown with disapproval (jealousy) when Ling had brightened at that idea.

From then on, he had listened raptly (though his attention did still wander from time to time) and she had sat, still ramrod-straight, still blank-faced, and ignored the ideas of all the pretty princesses he would court with this knowledge. (She thinks perhaps that was when she first began wearing a mask.)

So it was understandable, then, that Lan Fan didn't quite know what to do with herself on the day that Yao Ling absent-mindedly brushed the soft petals of a white gardenia against his mouth in a flimsy kiss, idly, and then handed the flower to her (as if it were an afterthought.)

She stood, as shocked-stiff as she had once sat in their private classroom (her young master had so many ways of amusing himself when the history lessons drew out mercilessly on a summer afternoon), and stared at the bloom in her hand as if it were a snake, coiled and weaving. She, quite honestly, did not know what to do with it. She had no use for such frivolous decorations, but she couldn't very well drop it or hand it back, not when she had learned as well as (or better than) her young master what the flower -- and the gift of it -- meant.

As she stood gaping at the blossom, he had gone on several steps ahead and now turned to look at her, an eyebrow arched playfully.

"Well?" he called back to her. "Are you just going to stand there all day? Keep up!"

And so she had to find somewhere to keep the flower (which was somehow easier than finding somewhere to keep the secret) and finally tucked it inside her jacket. She knew it would wilt there, and be crushed, but surely that was better than the alternative of letting it (him) go.