Work Text:
In the quiet of the night, your life is thrown into chaos.
It’s you, sitting up in your bed, the light of your phone shining on your face as you cradle it so gently with both hands. The sheets lay strewn about. You had thrown them off of you upon seeing the notification on your phone. On the screen, a single message. A single word. From the most important person in your life at that very moment.
“Yes,” it read.
You reread the chat thread. Reread it again. You look over the words again and again until you feel every letter burning into the back of your eyes. Your heart thunders in your chest. You hear a buzzing in your ears. Your face burns a million degrees too hot. Your cheeks hurt from how wide you’re smiling. From the start, again. You read the texts.
“You up?” you had texted Byleth.
“Now I am, haha” she had replied.
“Sorry. I just… had a question.” You had seriously considered whether or not you should have asked.
There was a pause. It was at this point you considered chucking your phone out the dorm window and calling it a night. You run your hand through your brown hair. How little the you of twenty minutes ago knew.
“Yeah?” she asks, after a few minutes.
“Are we just friends or what?” you wanted to ask. You had deleted that. The words made you too nervous. “So are you my girlfriend?” You had also deleted that. The very act of typing out the word “girlfriend” had made you break into a nervous sweat.
“You can ask me anything, El.” Came her message, no doubt after watching you type and delete words again and again.
At this point, you had imagined her, maybe lying back in the bed of her dorm room, the soft glow of the phone lighting up her features. Her soft grin, blue hair, kind eyes. You had looked at your windowsill, wistfully. There, perched on the ledge is a small succulent. It has certainly seen better days but it was doing its best of not dying.
“Remember the plant you gave me?” you sent.
“Kevin #8? Did he die again?” came the reply.
“No haha, Kevin #8 is still hanging in there.”
“Just say the word and Kevin #9 will be at your doorstep in 3-5 working days.”
“Hey, I’m getting better at this, you know. It’s been at least 2 weeks since I got Kevin #8.” It took you about two minutes to send the perfect sticker that encapsulated your feelings.
“Kevin #4 died the day you got him.” Came Byleth’s response. Almost too quick.
“Kevin #4 was an outlier and should be ignored.” You answered back, just as quickly.
A pause. She had typed. Stopped. Started again. Eventually she sends you “So what did you want to ask?”
You had looked at the plant. At the night sky beyond. Maybe, you had wondered, Byleth was looking at the same sky at that moment, too. Ah, you thought, you had become so sentimental.
“Why do you keep sending me plants?” you sent.
“You don’t like them?”
“No, it’s not that, I appreciate it a lot, really, I’m just… wondering why?”
Another pause.
“Remember when we watched that cheesy movie that one time?” she had finally sent.
You had giggled. The both of you had ended up binging on buttered popcorn and romcoms until the sun rose the next day. “There were a lot of cheesy movies haha,” you had replied.
“The one with the gardens,” she had clarified, as if that really narrowed down the options.
“Hmm. What about it?”
“There was a scene. The love interests kissed in the garden,” she had sent you. It was, as usual, kind of cryptic but you find that lack of clarity endearing.
“Yeah?” you had replied, trying to egg her on.
“Well, you said it was very romantic.”
“And?”
“I wanted to give you a garden.”
“Oh.”
Another pause. You were not sure what to say. It was Byleth, being as ridiculous as ever. The warmth that spread through your chest was soft, pleasant. You had closed your eyes then – imagined Byleth growing an entire garden just so she could kiss you there.
Byleth had sent another message. “I just realized sending you succulents wasn’t going to work.”
You had giggled. “Maybe when we make it to Kevin #30 we’ll have enough to form a small army of Kevins, which pretty much counts as a garden.”
“I’ll need to work another shift at the store to make that happen haha”
“WAIT,” you had sent, a jolt of realization buzzing through your body. It was at this point that you had risen from bed and thrown the covers off of your body.
“Yeah?” came Byleth’s response, as if she hadn’t implied anything incredible at all.
“Are you saying? That we’ll?? In the garden???”
“...Kiss?”
“Yeah…???” Your heart had pounded. You felt like you were on the verge of just passing out.
“Yes,” was the response.
And in the quiet of the night, you came to realize that roots don’t grow overnight. Slowly, slowly, in the small actions. In the gentle passage of time. The roots that you’d questioned were there all along.
And so you sent, with all the bravado you never thought you had:
“I love you, Byleth.”