[Saiunkoku] FIC: Floriography (Gen, PG)

Title: Floriography
Fandom: The Story of Saiunkoku
Recipient: ladyofthethread for the saiunkoku_fic Secret Santa exchange
Length: 1400 words
Content notes: Child abuse. The kind of Victorian AU where people with Japanese names wander around 19th century England for no apparent reason. Non-Victorian syntax. Not Brit-picked. Summary and header notes from John Henry Ingram's The Language of Flowers (1887), thank you, archive.org. This should have included striking mill workers, but I ran out of time and also kept getting distracted by the thoughts of the Rans as the Rosettis (Ryuuren becomes an Impressionist while travelling in France and comes back to England to talk utopian socialism with William Morris, what, he totally would have).

Summary: It is said that the language of flowers is as old as the days of Adam, and that the antiquity of floral emblems dates from the first throbbing of love in the human breast.

( The first world Ryuuki knows is cold stuffy rooms and bleak rocky hills. )