[ 'One day,' he thinks, 'One day moments like this won't just be a calm after a storm.'
Because it's the kind of question he absolutely wouldn't have expected Riku to ask - the kind of thing he didn't think Riku cared about. ]
... I asked him to pick one out for me, actually. He refused.
[ He smiles at the memory, perhaps a bit wider and more willing to be open because they aren't facing one another, almost as if to make up for that fact. He doesn't try to close his own hand around Riku's since he's the one recovering and there's the ground right under his hand, but Arden lets the contact remain - if it convinces Riku of something about Arden, then so be it. ]
So Arden is because... Ardent, the real meaning, and Garden. The shared letters of both words.
[ So minus the G of Garden and the T off the end of Ardent, the leftover was 'Arden' in both cases.
There was more, how he literally ran through a list of names in a book and pulled out a few different kinds of names - like all ones relating to nature due to his affection for Snow White and being unsatisfied with all of them, so the G-Arden-T version was the closest he could get. But ultimately it still came down to Garden + Ardent. ]
no subject
Because it's the kind of question he absolutely wouldn't have expected Riku to ask - the kind of thing he didn't think Riku cared about. ]
... I asked him to pick one out for me, actually. He refused.
[ He smiles at the memory, perhaps a bit wider and more willing to be open because they aren't facing one another, almost as if to make up for that fact. He doesn't try to close his own hand around Riku's since he's the one recovering and there's the ground right under his hand, but Arden lets the contact remain - if it convinces Riku of something about Arden, then so be it. ]
So Arden is because... Ardent, the real meaning, and Garden. The shared letters of both words.
[ So minus the G of Garden and the T off the end of Ardent, the leftover was 'Arden' in both cases.
There was more, how he literally ran through a list of names in a book and pulled out a few different kinds of names - like all ones relating to nature due to his affection for Snow White and being unsatisfied with all of them, so the G-Arden-T version was the closest he could get. But ultimately it still came down to Garden + Ardent. ]