I'm taking a break from my IkexSoren one-shots, since I've noticed a lot of my fave FE couples are lacking a lot of love on this site. First up are Lute and Artur, one of my favorite pairings of all time. There is just something so endearing about arrogant little Lute and her inability of fathom the concept of love and sweet tempered Artur who, though pious and shy and a bit awkward, is the one out of the two of them with his head on straight.

Enjoy!

In theory, it was something she should have easily understood.

She was a prodigy after all. Anything- be it fact, idea, or emotion- was within her grasp as long as it could be described in the written word. Whatever she read she could memorize, file away, and recite at will, and thus she had the potential to know almost everything there was to know. A walking dictionary, an ever ready memory bank- that was who she was. With all her knowledge, the thought of love should never have even given her pause. It was a subject poets and writers dwelt on often, and she could recall their words whenever she wanted. She knew how hearts could race, how pulses could flutter, how people could bend and change unexpectedly, how everything could be altered in an instant. She knew how sweet kisses could taste, how hard, insistent, and passionate they could become. She read all the words, remembered them all, and she should have easily understood.

But something was lost in the comprehension. Something even her brilliant mind couldn't fathom.

Listen to your feelings, he had said. Just be yourself. It sounded so simple falling from his lips! He was sure of himself in ways that she, even with all her pride and self admiration, could never be. Who he was wasn't buried under piles of facts and words that did not even truly belong to him, but her identity was. She hardly even knew how to begin to separate out what she believed from what the Ethics and Philosophies of Magic told her to believe. Her being was too entangled with the textbooks she devoured to truly be distinguished from them; over time, they had slowly become one in the same.

Don't over think it, he'd warned. I love you for who you are. You don't have to change if you don't feel comfortable changing. Just try to open yourself up to the idea. I love you, and I want you to be able to love me back as much as you're capable of doing.

She wasn't sure. If what the books told her about love wasn't enough to show her what to do and how to behave, what possibly could? She did have one idea, and there was a chance it could possibly work. All she would have to do was change her thinking a little. Imagine it was one big experiment. Pretend that she, since no such book actually existed to her knowledge, was writing The Beginner's Guide to Letting Yourself Love the Redheaded Monk With Interesting and Peculiar Habits Who Also Happens to Love You. Instead of finding the answer in a library, she would have to discover it herself through experience. She could manage that, couldn't she? Hadn't she been conducting experiments for her own entertainment for years?

Artur was standing in the kitchen of the little cottage they shared, absently smiling and staring off into space as he brewed himself a pot of tea. Poor, unsuspecting monk. It only took Lute a minute to wrestle him away from his task and pin him sputtering and flushed to the floor. "What are you doing?" he yelped, though he was rather used to such unexpected outbursts from Lute. He was her favorite test subject, after all, and he'd been forced to drop whatever he was doing to give into her precocious whims more often than he could recall.

"Experimenting," Lute responded with relish, although she was not truly feeling her usual vigor and confidence. The main emotion she was experiencing was foreign to her, but it felt somewhat like the descriptions of nervousness she'd heard before. Sweaty palms. A trembling heart. An increased heart rate, a jagged intake of breath.

"What about the tea?" he argued feebly, and she dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

"This is more important. Tea comes secondary to a chance to expand the brilliance of my mind. Sit up, please." She removed her hands from him, and he slowly picked himself up so he was sitting Indian style across from her. As he adjusted himself, she breathed in deeply and shut her eyes.

"Er, Lute? Are you all right?"

"Of course I am. Just give me a moment..." She relaxed her body as if she were meditating, emptying her mind of all other thoughts but her own. To make this a true experiment, she would have to go into this knowing nothing, expecting nothing, feeling nothing but what she naturally felt. Drained of everything but the nervousness dancing like frantic moths in her heart.

"Okay," she said after a moment. "I think I'm ready. Take my hand."

Artur almost questioned this strange request, but the unsteady look on Lute's features made him stop. Was she... worried about something? Lute, of all people? He shrugged and gently slid his hand into hers, lacing their fingers together tightly. Her palms were sweatier than normal, a fact which made him smile to himself. She was nervous, for once in her life.

New feelings rushed through Lute at his touch. Warmth. Familiarity. Peace. She racked her brain for a moment, searching for the right word... comfort. This was the feeling of being at home, of being protected and sheltered. A part of love she had not known existed before, though it seemed so obvious now. How could her superior skills and powers of observation have missed it before? It made sense that this was an aspect of affection that drew them together. They had always been a home to each other, and this was just another way of expressing that notion.

"Now," she murmured at length, her voice all but absent of its usually bluster, "Mimic that gesture General Seth is always doing when Lady Eirika is exhausted. The one where it looks like he's about to squeeze her like a boa constrictor."

"It's called 'putting your arms around someone's waist'," Artur said drily. "What kind of experiment is this, anyways?"

"The kind where you leave me to my ideas and follow my infallible guidance. Now do it."

Artur smiled. Well, it wasn't as if the thought of embracing all of her sleek and child-like slightness repulsed him, so he might as well just do it...

Lute took the time to ponder this new form of contact. This one was all about closeness. The need to draw on the strength of another body. The physical manifestation of being needed, desired. Her faced flushed crimson at the sensation. So this is what Artur also meant whenever he said he loved her. He loved the way she spoke to him and all the things she did and said, but he loved this, too. The feel of her beside him, her skin beneath his fingertips.

With his arms locked firmly around her, Artur could feel Lute trembling. He couldn't help but worry- how strange and unnatural all of this must feel to her!- but he knew better than to interrupt her mid-experiment. When she had a plan, she had to see it through to the end for the sake of knowledge and learning, and this was no exception.

"I need for you to... to..." She gulped, something she had never done before. "...Kiss me?"

Artur didn't think twice about this request. This was something he had been wanting to do ever since he first confessed that he loved her, though he had been smart enough to know not to do it a moment before she was ready. Lute was intrinsically wary of things she had no knowledge of, and kissing was no exception. If he had tried it without her wanting or understanding the act, he might have damaged the newborn love they were at that point beginning to share beyond any hope of repair.

But now she was ready, and so too was he. Artur, his heart nearly exploding with longing and affection, slowly slid his hands up from her waist, drawing them up the plains of her arms, down through the groves of her shoulders, gently against the curves of her neck, at last bringing them to a stop against the softly blushing apples of her cheeks. Lute lifted her chin slightly and parted her lips, her body responding naturally to what was to come. This at last was the moment of truth.

As their lips met together, his confident and exacting, hers a bit uncertain and tentative, Lute's heart flooded with thousands of things that she had never understood before. So this is love, she marveled wondrously, the excitement of discovery bursting within her. Of course. I knew my brilliant mind would understand it if I applied myself. There's no one better than me, after all! I'm the best there is... But her thoughts stopped short for a moment or two as Artur increased the pressure of their kiss and began to push their bodies down so that they were lying on the floor. Lute wasn't sure what this action meant, but she could only surmise that this position was more comfortable for Artur, whose long limbs were bound to become cramped if they were not sprawled out in all of their lanky glory.

Lute was able to maintain this dance of passion and affection for a considerable amount of time, but as soon as Artur loosed his hold on her lips and began unclasping her cape and toying with the fastenings of her gown, she squirmed out from underneath him and jumped to her feet.

"I love you, Artur," she crowed, her faced flushed with adoration for both the redheaded monk and her own intelligence. "My experiment worked! I must get my field journal and write down everything I've learned. Maybe I can even write that book so I can help other prodigies like myself understand the abstract concept of love. The Beginner's Guide to Letting Yourself..." But before she finished announcing her train of thought, she darted off to her bedroom in excitement.

Artur sighed and picked himself off the floor. He gave Lute a moment to open up her journal and begin her first few sentences- he didn't want to know what those would be and how he would factor in to them- so he could take the tea he had been brewing earlier off the stove and clean up the kitchen while he was still unoccupied. His short little tasks complete, he followed her back into the bedroom, shutting the doors behind him.

She loved him- she'd said so herself. He wasn't going to let her slip out of his grasp this time.

Hmm... looks like Lute is about to learn something new for her Beginner's Guide...