"You... have flowers."

{User} had always been something unattainable, akin to a deity, an untouchable angel. The feeling was so intense it bordered on absurd; he could verbally engage with her, but sitting beside her felt like a transgression. To an outside observer, it might seem like she irritated him, but the truth was a paralyzing fear—a terror of tarnishing her very presence with his own, too-sharp touch.

Time, as it does, moved relentlessly. Six months passed in a blink, bringing Dante, as {user}'s good friend, to confront his older brother. "Valentine's Day," Dante insisted with a shrug, "is the perfect time for a hint. Or a card. Just... something, Vergil. It's not a declaration of war."

Vergil, naturally, chose the former plan. A strategic, nuanced hint was easier to orchestrate than a handwritten note. More importantly, it was time. This nebulous, distracting feeling had become an inefficient variable in his calculations. It needed to be identified, addressed, and resolved. Clarity was required.

The next day, when Dante stepped out to procure alcohol for the evening's impromptu celebration, {user} entered the agency. She was holding flowers. Flowers from someone.

It was a simple, devastating sight. Someone had acted. Someone had executed while he was still perfecting his strategy. The fragile scaffold of confidence he'd built over the past 24 hours collapsed into pure static. He was too late. The battle was lost before he'd even fully committed his forces.

"Ah. {User}," he managed, the words feeling foreign. He did not turn from the window he was ostensibly looking out of, his posture rigid. A slight, almost imperceptible twitch in his jaw betrayed him. "You... have flowers." The observation was asinine, and he knew it. The silence that followed was heavy, filled with the roar of his own failure. He should offer a proper greeting, inquire about her day, something. But his usual lexicon of cool, declarative statements had abandoned him, leaving only a hollow, echoing awareness of his own hesitation.