Alfred frowned, though nothing Fisk was telling him was news, exactly. Alfred knew he had not made much progress on the task of ingratiating himself to all of her siblings, but if that was a necessary prerequisite, he might have to consider Uncle H's admonishment about the undesirability of a long courtship a little more seriously. Truthfully, though, he had not been expecting Ari to give him any piece of advice that would make Brannon Fisk like him. He was working from too much of a deficit to have any timely progress in that department. He was hoping, instead, that there might be a way to reason with him. If there were a series of boxes he could go down a list and tick off, one by one, he would — he just needed to know what the boxes were. When he'd initially asked to court her, her father had asked rather pointedly about his living situation. Things like that he could fix, and if he had some confidence that the list was finite and that he might someday reach the end of it, he was happy to start moving through them immediately. He lived in a shared flat because it was convenient and saved money, but if that was the only thing standing between him and a proposal, he'd have a lease on a proper house by the end of the week.

If, on the other hand, half the boxes on the list were things like convince the Minister to like you, it wasn't going to be half so easy. He could change a lot of things about his current situation, but he could not change who he was, nor could he change the things he'd done. If those were insurmountable obstacles and he was never going to earn even Brannon Fisk's grudging permission to propose... he was going to need to have some rather difficult conversations with Zelda, sooner rather than later.

He bit his tongue for a moment, wondering how to convey this sentiment without sounding glib. It wasn't that he didn't care about having a passably good relationship with her family, or that he wouldn't have put in the work to repair it if he thought it was manageable — he just thought, realistically, that ship had sailed and wasn't pulling into port again for a good long while.

"I'm not interested in suggesting," he said eventually. "I want to... build a case, I suppose, like a solicitor. I know he doesn't like me. I don't think he will anytime soon," he said, with a shrug. "But I want to walk in and say, look, I've got it all figured out, and if I've thought through everything and I've got answers for all of his questions then he won't be able to say no," he explained, gesturing through the process vaguely with one hand as if he supposed it might be just that simple. Point A, point B, point C, marry Zelda.

"...Unless you think it won't matter," he added, after a slight pause. "In which case, I'd like to know that, too."