farina | A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose

Title: A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose
Fandom: Tales of Symphonia
Words: 2,764 words
Summary: A flower could not deceive. It was what it was—something she had never been able to be. Or free to be.
Pairing/Character: Raine/Regal
Extra Info: This was originally written and posted December 31, 2009 for none other than @kippielovesyou. The original prompt was, “Secretly, all along, it was me.” This was a massive rewrite lmao.
Rating: T
Genre: It’s hard to classify this, character study-ish, friendship, hint of romance. Kind of a “secret admirer” bit.

Notes:

FLOWERS MENTIONED IN THE STORY:

Iris, specifically the yellow flag iris. (Fun tidbit: yellow irises symbolize passion!)
Daffodil
Dog violets: “Dog” refers to the lack of scent. in The Language of Flowers it’s said that the sender’s thoughts were “occupied with love” for the recipient when they gift this flower lmao.
Petunia: The Maya and Inca believed the scent had the power to ward off underworld monsters and spirits.
Pansy: Comes from the French pensée, for thought.
Goldenrod
Smooth Blue Aster
Wild Rose. I ended with a rose, specifically a white rose, to give a nod to an old RP where my partner said Raine’s favorite flower was a rose, and I had chosen Regal’s favorite color as white. I went with wild roses because they bloom for such a short time and are otherwise not very extraordinary, so it is a bit special he saw these to even pick for her. I also like to imagine these don’t bloom in Sylvarant, since it’s the declining world.

TERMINOLOGY:

Perennial: Persistent, enduring; a plant that lives several years or more.
Tender Perennial: Plant that can live for many years but is not winter hardy (meaning if it’s not stored properly over the cold months, will die).
Biennial: A plant that lives for two years. (It seems pretty common for them to go to seed in that second year.)
Annual: A plant that lives for one year/season.
Basal: Having leaves that grow at the base of the plant instead of up the stems.
Rhizomes: A continuous growing horizontal stem that puts out lateral shoots. Basically, a plant that grows and spreads by putting its roots out. These can be notoriously hard to kill when they are unwanted.
Remontant: Blooming or producing a crop more than once a year/season. Some irises bloom in the spring and again in the fall, for example.

CHANGES FROM THE ORIGINAL:

So in rereading this story, I found myself at a bit of an impasse. On one hand, the original was still very cute. On the other hand, it also felt a bit lacking—or at least, too fast-paced/not detailed enough. I think there’s something to be said for brevity, but sometimes a story really does just need more words. So I, like, tripled the word count.

I hope this did not make it sound too pretentious.

The only sentiment I didn’t keep at all was a line where Raine wondered why she’d even been born. I believe this is perfectly in character for her to think about, and even consider, but I couldn’t find a reasonable placement for it within the rewritten story. So I scrapped it. I just think this story isn’t the place for an existential crisis.
Despite me literally growing irises at the time of writing the original, I wasn’t accurate in writing about them, mostly because I grew a different variety than I was writing about LMAO.
In the original work, the only flowers presented to Raine were yellow irises. Since the story takes place over weeks, it seemed silly to imagine that Regal would be able to access that same flower, let alone the same color, every single time. I could have had them follow a river and forced it to make sense that way, but in the end I just thought it might be more interesting to spice it up.

NOTES ON THE REWRITE:

I wasn’t very clear about it because it doesn’t really matter, but Regal cut those flowers with the knife he uses for cooking. You know, the one he loves so much and carries with him everywhere.
Raine is such a curious person, it’s hard to justify her not just instantly quizzing everyone about who left the flower for her. So I hinted at her treating it like a puzzle to solve/game to be played, and that combined with just being busy and generally tired (with WAY more important things to think about and consider) made it work enough for me.
I REALLY REALLY felt it was important to spend the earlier parts of the story playing up how carefully these flowers were handled and delivered. First of all, Raine needs some tender loving care; she never seems to catch a break. But more significantly, it was important to me to show Regal as having a gentle hand (sort of to counter his guilt in using his hands to kill).
- I fully admit I probably have a case of the Shipper TeeHees™, but I couldn’t support a ship for Raine that wasn’t with someone who was gentle.
I like to imagine this is the precursor to her skit with Regal where she gets him to agree with her that ensuring Lloyd doesn’t die is the most important thing they can do. This is basically what she’s beginning to wrestle with at the start of the last scene, the knowledge that she might even have to sacrifice her brother if it means Lloyd lives, because all their hopes rest on him.
Raine’s house had some flower baskets outside, so I like to imagine she’s the one who enjoys gardening. Plus, with her memory and intelligence, I think she’d find plants at least fairly interesting. (And it gives her an interest that isn’t related to her past trauma, which I think she needs.)
Regal doing this was a gesture of friendship and care. I like to imagine he heard from Genis that she liked flowers (or even grew them) and wanted to do something to try and boost her spirits. Obviously I’d like to imagine this develops into more in the future, but for now it is what it is. (And honestly, for Raine, I think that’s plenty for her to digest for the foreseeable future.)
THIS WAS SO SO SO SO HARD TO REWRITE.
- Usually when I rewrite something, the bones of the story are good, and that was true here. But like also usually the intro is fine, and it was not here. So I had to more or less figure out not only how to end the story again, but also begin it.
- I FELT INSANELY OUT OF PRACTICE.

As a person with a green thumb I still had to look up everything to double check facts. They call my office space at work “plant therapy” (and people bring me their nearly deceased plants so that I can cast Resurrection on them, the payment of which is that they don’t get their plant back) but there’s still a pretty big difference between writing about plants and growing them.

END NOTES:

My biggest goal for this story, besides getting Raine’s “scholarly” understanding and perception of flowers correct-sounding, was to correctly present this complex issue Raine has been dealing with her whole life. She’s a half-elf & she knows she’s a half-elf, but she’s lied about that for years. Obviously she lied with good reason, but this has affected her, probably deeply. She’s eventually caught out in front of her friends and the people who trusted her the most, and it puts her brother’s life in incredible danger (along with her own, but let’s not pretend she would have cared too much about that at the time). Even though it worked out okay, it was probably still terrifying for her.

As if that’s not enough, Zelos spends like a quarter of the game admitting outright that he hates half-elves*, the Heimdall elves still won’t let them anywhere near the village, her mom abandoned her without explanation giving her lifelong abandonment issues, and she was basically the definition of a parentified child very early on. AND NONE OF THAT is even considering what happened before she started teaching in Iselia. Like, how did an 11-year-old take care of an infant? :(

She’s had a very hard life for someone so young.

Anyway, Raine is a very complex character and very obviously struggles with trust and reliance on others—a product of having only herself to rely on for the majority of her life.

"A flower is a flower” was meant in the original to be a pang of jealousy from her: she wanted to find that courage, too, to be as earnestly herself. In this rewrite I still wanted to convey part of that sentiment, but I also felt like the point of Regal being there at all was that he was meant to be a catalyst for her to start feeling comfortable relying on and trusting her friends so that she could eventually strike out with Genis to work to end discrimination against half-elves (per the end of the game).

So not only does this function as a bridge between the main game storyline & her skit with Regal about protecting Lloyd’s life at all cost, but it’s also a bridge to get her to the ending of the game in a slightly easier and (hopefully?) more believable manner...since the game was a little blasé about how she went from literal years about lying about her identity to being comfortable holding rallies or whatever she does.

--

*Yeah, yeah, he becomes a bare minimum decent person in the end, and I do respect that, but like, it’s awful it took being forced into the company of two half-elves to even make him care at all. This is the equivalent of a man who doesn’t care about rape until it affects his wife or daughter. I guess at least he changed but it had to feel bad for Raine and Genis.

A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose | Tales of Symphonia