March 18th, 1893 - Honeyduke's Sweet Shop
Elias Grimstone

Quin eyed the large grandfather clock in the corner. It neared four and he was rather thinking this last hour might crawl by. He did own the place, he could close up now, but he always felt a little guilty about that when people tended to still stop in on their way to home. He didn't have anything exciting to do tonight anyway, just clean up and sleep. He'd been unusually tired this week, perhaps he was coming down with something.

Puttering around the shop somewhat aimlessly, Quin picked up the broom and started to make his way around the floors, down the aisles, straightening things up as he went. He stopped half a dozen times to fix something, including a shelf that was damn near falling down, which then turned into him searching for his toolbox, then reorganizing the tools inside, and by the time he remembered he shelf, the broom has swept the entire store by itself. Magic was delightful.

So he laid himself down in the aisle, beneath the wobbly shelf, which is of course where Elias found him, half in the shelf trying to screw part of the back in. He could have used magic, but good as he was with cooking charms, he did not have the focus not to accidentally blow something up. "Hello stranger." He greeted from his position on the floor. He hadn't seen the broommaker since the Potts' Christmas party and even then they hadn't gotten much time to actually talk. Just raise an eyebrow at one another at the dinner table, surrounded by the sisters and their extended family.

"What can I do for ya?" Hopefully Elias didn't mind if he just finished up this quick task.

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Quin had more riding on his courtship than probably he even knew. And Elias might have had more room to be impressed by the news that Quin was on the apparent verge of marriage, if Daffy wasn’t so keen to give her sister her time in the sun and he wasn’t having to be epitome of patience.

‘Course, beyond the inconvenience of Quincey Honeyduke setting the pace of more relationships than his own, this was all a little bit funny, a twist of fate he had been quite blindsided by at Christmas. So it was an opportunity to come poke fun and find out more in equal measure – although it did have Elias taking a good few minutes to scour the sweetshop for his friend.

Eventually, he found him with his head stuck under a shelf, and Elias laughed good-naturedly, waving him on. “Feel like I should be asking you that, maybe,” he returned, squinting at the shelf situation and wondering if Quin was actually as handy with a toolbox as he was in the kitchen. “Need a hand?” If he didn’t, then it was all the same to him – Elias was perfectly happy propping himself up here in the aisle and talking to the loose shelf about their marriage prospects. Might even be easier to keep a straight face that way.

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Never mind that his back already hurt and he was feeling his age today, Quin supposed the man who worked with wood for a living might have a better idea of what was actually wrong here. Plus Elias was a few years younger, he could handle it. "I think one of the dovetails snapped." Which Quin didn't exactly know how to fix without taking the whole shelf down, so he slid himself out of the way and started to take the products off the shelf themselves.

"Looks like you have good timing, stopping in. I hope you accept payment in chocolate," Quin laughed. "Or should it be in flowers?" He quirked an eyebrow at Elias over his shoulder, clearly amused. It was a funny sort of situation they found themselves in. Quin hadn't thought too much about it since the party, but now that he was, he supposed it didn't quite surprise him. There were a lot of Potts sisters after all and both he and Elias were of an age where they ought to be already settled down.

Once everything was moved out of the way, Quin pulled the shelf from the case and the dovetail popped right off. "Whoops." Well, at least he'd been right.

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“Hm.” Elias bent down to peer in better at the back of the shelf as Quin started destocking and dismantling it, but let out a snort of a laugh at the question of payment. “Thanks, but I think I’ve had more than my fair share of flowers already,” he joked back, wondering if Quin had faced that same Potts effect of being effectively showered in them over the length of his acquaintanceship.

“But you knew that,” he added with another grin, unable to ever keep the fondness quite off his face when he was talking – or thinking – about Daffodil. “Anyway, congratulations, I should say,” he returned, thinking that Quin was long overdue to be courting anyway. He dropped down to the floor to inspect the shelf joints and the broken dovetail, but cast Quin a probing glance too. “So, go on – it’s all going well with you?”

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It was a good thing Elias had stopped by when he did. Quin's botched patch job would be a much poorer solution than anything the broommaker could come up with. Certainly Quin was not completely useless, but there were some thing that should be better left to those with the right knowhow.

"Thanks," Quin laughed. It felt some kind of odd to be congratulated on courting a lady, especially when he had tried twice before, though not quite so officially. His relationship with Felicity had been technically a courtship, but it had been far more casual than this. With Dahlia he had done everything properly (minus a couple meetings here and there) but it seemed to have worked out for the better this go around.

"It is going well, I feel a little old," Dahlia was hardly twenty yet, but he was young at heart and she was a bit of an old soul, so they met nicely somewhere in the middle. "We enjoy a lot of the same things, enjoy spending time together." Quin didn't really know how to qualify it to anyone else, mostly because he'd never had to, but he figured Elias might already understand. "And you?" Quin knew the Potts sisters to be as varied as their flowered names, but little else. Miss Daffodil had always been easy to do business with, if that counted for anything.

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“Well, at least you’re settling down before you’re in your sixties,” Elias joked, as if Quin hadn’t had much hope left (and at the same time, he wondered if he should be counting any chickens before they’d hatched; courting was not quite married, after all, and neither of their prospects needed unduly jinxing).

Given Quin had promised him payment in chocolate, or perhaps because he didn’t care enough to be subtle about it, Elias rustled his way through the wrapper of a couple chocolates where they’d just been pulled off the shelf; he never was thinking about food until it was right in front of him, besides.

He cocked his head at Honeyduke ever so slightly, trying to decide how far to read into that description, at how close they really were. Enjoying spending time together was almost a prerequisite for courtship – but then Quin had seemed rather merry back at the Potts’ Christmas, so he suspected there was some real measure of affection there. Elias wanted to probe a little further, but he was well aware this was a two-way interrogation, so wasn’t sure how much he would dare. “Yeah,” Elias said, having swallowed that piece of chocolate and sighed a little as he picked up the loose shelf again, “she’s – one of a kind. Easy to be around. It’s – more natural than I thought it could be, I s’pose?” Elias shook his head. He felt lucky, maybe. He hadn’t expected her, and hadn’t expected to feel the way he did.

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   Daffodil Grimstone

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Quin had to chuckle as Elias tucked into a couple of chocolates. "Ha, you sound like that wasn't where I was headed." He grimaced thinking of all of the failed attempts before. He'd gotten close with Felicity, but even the strong feelings there had faded into nothing, overwhelmed by life and obligations they couldn't avoid.

Noting how Elias spoke of Miss Daffodil, Quin nodded along. The Potts girls were certainly something. "I don't suppose I told you how we actually met?" Quin pulled a face. It was slightly embarrassing for him, though it had worked out as intended in the long run, having to thank his "niece" for an unwanted Witch Weekly feature was something he would probably never get over.

"My niece," Quin didn't know how else to explain Billie to others, so he just went with it. Elias probably wouldn't know any better. "Submitted a Lonely Hearts letter to Witch Weekly. I didn't even know that was a thing, did you?" The whole thing had been funny, afterwards, but at the time, a bit mortifying. "You write in, and then ladies write back. Except I didn't, Billie did it for me. I got several replies and had to go about letting everyone down gently, with sweets as compensation of course." He sighed. "And Dahlia sent some back, so we got to swapping food, tips and recipes." A strange way to go about it, certainly, but in the long run seemed to be a good way to get to know one another.

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   Elias Grimstone

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“No, you didn’t,” Elias agreed, shooting him a keen look because that face meant there was something fun there. His efforts were ostensibly on fixing the shelf, but although he was fiddling with it his attentions were almost entirely on Quin’s little tale, and he had to bark with laughter at that.

“Accidentally through Witch Weekly?” Elias wheezed, because although he understood the concept he, like Quincey, was as far removed from the sphere of ladies’ magazines as it was possible to be, and this apparent niece of his was an excellent little imp to have done it. Every second anew that he envisioned the letters, though, he cracked up with another chuckle. “Mate. I can’t believe that worked.” Any of it, the sweets, the letters, recipe-swapping. Merlin, if that was the way it had gone, Miss Dahlia must be perfect for him – but perhaps Elias would have to let Whatever Weekly Witch this was know the hand she’d had in getting him this far. Lonely Hearts, ha!

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"I guess it really did, yeah." Quin hadn't thought too much on it, but in the end Billie had indeed won. Her letter to the magazine had gotten him where he was, in a long, roundabout manner. He wondered if Witch Weekly would take credit when they married. That would be sort of amusing.

Quin shrugged, "I'd sort of given up on being intentional, so I suppose this was kind of done for me." It was easier. He supposed that he might be a little bit better at writing letters than he'd originally thought. Having time to think about a reply, on subjects he enjoyed, had flowed a lot easier than a stilted, supervised conversation. Quin knew he was an amiable sort of person, but when put on the spot, when it mattered, he tended to stiffen up. This had eliminated that.

Thinking he'd done enough of the talking so far, Quin watched Elias fix whatever it was with the shelf and summoned the broom back to him so he could sweep the aisle while he stood there. "And Miss Daffodil? Her new shop seems to be doing well." Quin supplied the treats she sold at any rate, and they kept selling out.

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“I don’t know if I’d say I was looking, either,” Elias admitted in turn, because he was not in much of a position to poke fun at Quin beyond the Lonely Hearts part of the scenario. “She just fell into my life at the – right time, I s’pose.” His grin turned a little inward at that choice of words. “Or, rather, I fell into her life. But she is doing well.”

The shop had been all her, something she had cultivated on her own, and – for someone who had done the same sort of thing when he’d been young, setting out on his own two feet with only themselves to depend on – he knew the strength of purpose it really took. Quin could no doubt appreciate the work that had gone into it, as well.

“She works too hard,” he said fondly.

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Quin's expression was that of complete understanding, familiar with the tone in which Elias spoke of Miss Daffodil. Quin though the coincidence of finding someone when they had stopped looking was no small feat. They had both gotten to a point where if it happened, great, if not, well they were at least settled in their professions to have that to rely on. It was sort of amusing how the stories seemed to parallel one another, and involved a Potts lady.

"Don't we all." Building something from scratch, piece by piece, into something to be proud of was no easy feat. It seemed that Miss Daffodil had landed on her feet though. "Perhaps if you're lucky you can start selling brooms at the florist." Quin teased.

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Yeah, he could start selling broomsticks at Wildflowers and the Florist Potts, and soon they’d be selling flowers at the sweetshop, and on and on it went. “We’d better be careful,” he joked, throwing out the thought of marriage as if it didn’t terrify him a little, that things were so serious. “If the other Potts daughters marry too, Hogsmeade might end up being one big shop.” Another few local businesses, and they’d have a veritable monopoly; Hogsmeade might as well become an oversized department store.

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look ANOTHER beautiful bee!set <3

"Wouldn't that be a sight?" Quin chuckled. He was already selling sweets in the Alley via Miss Daffodil, so it was part of the way there. He swept around Elias from where he finished up with the shelf, set on right and all ready to go.

"Would you look at that?" No tools necessary, not something Quin would have managed on his own. In fact, he probably would have made it worse and would have had to had something come look at it anyway. "Come on, I'll package up your payment." Quin laughed, thinking he could put everything back on the shelf after he got Elias all straightened out.

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