As the title says, Daphne is in trouble, multiple counts of trouble. But when isn't she? That's what happens when you don't think and you just do things. Whatever catches your fancy, whenever it does. Really, it's Astoria's fault though, because Astoria introduced her to Cottagecore, and also Hogwart's fault for introducing her to brawny men in scarlet. So anyway, when school and the second war and all that is over and done with, the prettiest Greengrass sister packs her bags and takes herself off east and north, there to open a magical flower shop in the first place her dart lands on when she throws it in the direction of that gigantic spray of green and brown and white known as 'Russia'. It's a good a way as any for dealing with nostalgia and heartsoreness. Just leave it all up to chance. Surely one's true love will find and rescue one out of a nation of multiple hundreds (of millions)?

Her magical flower shop in the middle of nowhere, Siberia (Norilsk), when she gets it set up, is something straight out of a muggle cosy or idle game. Plant pots full of leafy, dangerous plants such as spitting sunflowers, Venus flytraps, and one, lone, glorious example of the titan arum, congregate outside it's curved glass front, which itself comes complete with cute little stickers of anthropomorphic chibi representations of flowers. The place might just be the happiest place in the entirety of Eastern Europe, and it shows in the number of customers she receives. Customers and visitors. People come, stomping over snow and mud, just to take photos with the flowers, and also occasionally purchase things. 

Trouble One: Norilsk 

 The place is actively hostile to life, all life, including the plant variety. Its massive nickel factories spew poison into the air day and night. It kills people, it kills animals, it kills plants, all so that valuable metal may be drawn up from the permafrost. Daphne reacts by creating a shield around herself and her plants, their continued good health a subject of continued comment by her customers, who sometimes stop by just to breath air free of nickel.

Day and night - for almost half the year one or the other reigns supreme, thanks to Norilsk being within the Arctic Circle. Also a problem for plants, not to mention human beings. People go mad, cannot take constant night or worse, constant day. To this problem, Daphne sets up permanent, auto-renewing lumos instances in her store and conservatory, which acts as a flame in the night for the drab moths who call the most polluted city on earth home. Pale faces press themselves to the glass at midday, when it is dark, and dark it will remain. Slowly but surely, sales increase, especially after Daphne sneaks a few 'improvements' into the plant pots her products come in.

Cold. It's frighteningly cold. Hideously, monumentally cold. The snow piles itself in building sized drifts all around the little flower shop. Much of it has turned black thanks to the pollution. Cold, another thing that plants, especially the tropical and semi-tropical plants which she stocks in great number, do not like. For this problem she uses diffuse warming charms which change in strength depending on the plant to be kept nice and toasty. This concession to the extreme environment also helps to draw customers and the curious in, although it also leads to loiterers. But luckily Daphne was in Slytherin house, and is not shy about using her sharp tongue to lash them back out.

Trouble Two: Him

 God seems to approve of her decision to leave it up to chance, as the one she came to Russia to pursue, ends up within her flower shop. Had she tried to force the issue, she would have leveraged her contacts via her sister's husband to attempt to discover the more or less super secret suspected location of the Durmstrang Institute, and set up shop as close to it as possible, and probably she would never have encountered the fish she was after. But set up shop in the hellhole her dart landed on, and he walks in after two weeks of her being there. That is just how life works. God likes whimsy, and so does she.

The problem is, it's not a meet-cute, partly because of her, and partly because of him.

Daphne is tending the spitting sunflowers when the door opens, the Nickel City attempting to break the magical hermetic seal by pushing its freezing, gross, pitch black air inside her pretty, warm, lightsome shop. However, Daphne's spells repel the invasion. But they can't stop the arguing couple that enter from harshing the vibes. Couple? There's three people, but no one counts children.

"Don't make me abduct you, Lina, because I will. You can't stay here. It's a bad place, and I hope I don't need to explain why for the millionth time." The man, currently hidden behind some stinking corpse lillies, is speaking Russian, obviously, but Daphne knows the language like a native. Sent an owl to her parents the same day a fairytale galleon burst from the waters of Hogwart's Lake. Plus, the voice is very refined, which makes figuring out what it's saying so much easier.

A female voice answers, light and high, evoking the figure of a young girl simultaneously with a grown woman who has had to endure far too much in her short life, so much so that her threats are very far from idle. "Try it and I'll put you in hospital, Yura, and you can enjoy that holiday you always complain you never receive."

"If you won't move for you, than move for Mashenka. Norilsk is no place for a child."

"There's plenty of children here."

The couple emerge into Daphne's view from around the spiky fronds of a noxious grasper, which, as it's name implies, attempts to grasp them. They nimbly dodge it without comment, and if Daphne didn't already know that at least the guy was a wizard, that nonchalant move would tell her all she needs to know.

"Oh my gosh…" clapping her hand to her mouth, she turns away, her eyes watering, her cheeks reddening. The word problem is writ large in her mind, like this:

PROBLEM

Anyway, composure. Compose yourself, Daphne!

"Sunflowers!" squeals a little girl.

The couple swing by the spitting sunflowers, and come to a stop. Yuri gently adjusts his grip on the child riding on his arm, her small one casually flung around his neck, confidant that she will not be dropped. A child which is unquestionably his, going by her curly black hair, dark eyes, and long, narrow face, very much like a Greek wolf's. Daphne's stomach plummets and she attempts to hide behind the giant, aggressive flowers her potential customers are admiring. 

"Spitting sunflowers. Hmm. These could come in handy." Says the mother of the child, again obvious by the way she looks at the girl and the man the girl is using for a vehicle. Daphne searches for rings, but finds one on the woman's hand only. 

"Oh my gooooosh. What have you done, you idiot!" she whimpers.

"Huh?" The couple who are not a couple, look away from their shared child towards the flower store proprietor, narrowing their eyes at the parts of her visible between hairy leaves. 

"Ahh, sorry, did I say that out loud?" she asks.

"Um…" Taking her daughter from her father, the small, blonde woman moves off to a different part of the store, where she regards a cluster of singing roses. When her companion appears to want to follow, Daphne steps out from behind the sunflowers.

The Slytherin attempts to both flirt, and apply tender, soothing reassurance, a mix that doesn't work, especially not when coming from her mouth. "Yuri. Even though you've totally screwed your life up and never wrote me like you said you would, you're still really, painfully good looking. It's not all over for you yet, I promise, and I forgive you for being you." 

"Excuse…oh. Daphne Greengrass. I should have known." A flush darkens Daphne's 'long lost' (as she calls it) crush's olive skin, and he doesn't whip his wand out and blast her, which is something. Now, just to figure out where he lives, and how to solve his severe emotional problems. Flowers are the key, certainly.

"It's not over, because it never began for him." The blonde woman, Lina, says, her soft voice flying from her full lips to effortlessly arc over the roses to swoop round and strike her once upon lover in the back. He doesn't grimace, but does turn to stare at her forlornly, invoking the ghost of Ian Brady.

Really, it would be an extremely bad idea to step into such a situation. Like stepping into a maelstrom. Why would anyone do such a thing? There's, like, at least a million men on earth.

Ah, but how many pureblooded men are there? Not a million. Not a million at all. And how many of them are pretty?

Trouble Three: Him (Part Two)

 By a process of deduction (i.e by observing that the flowers the woman, Alina, ordered are to be delivered to an address in Norilsk) Daphne comes to understand that she's hit the jackpot. Landed on a flytrap, as it were. Now, all she needs to do is grab said fly before the beautiful plant does. Happily, Venus proves surprisingly cooperative.

"Here, the address of his shop. When he's not executing criminals, crushing the egos of schoolchildren, or following Viktor around, you'll find him there, inking idiots while scheming how best to irritate me next." 

When the man, who once almost caused Daphne to perish by appearing within Hogwarts whilst wearing Durmstrang's blood red dress robes, has run away into the false night with his tail between his legs, Alina hands his contact details to a woman she's never met and knows nothing about. The hardness of her turquoise eyes and the set of her mouth convinces Daphne of her case without her even having to state it.

"Are you saying you aren't upset by me coming all this way just to poach him from you?" She asks.

"No. He needs to be poached. For his own good. He was a beautiful mistake of mine, that I would like to correct." replies the woman, while she watches her child play with a stinging nettle. "I am going to marry someone else, and give my daughter a father better able to take care of her, and myself."

In such a way the savage blondes, strangers till two minutes before, come to an agreement, shaking on it. In such a way, Alina acquires free floral arrangements.

 But things can never be easy when there are children involved. If there wasn't a child involved, she wouldn't have to prepare for an extended siege upon a masculine fortress. Daphne's advent into Yuri's magical tattoo shop down the way, perilously near to his ex's flat, is not as glorious as she dreamed of the night before. It's a badass, bad boy, awesome SS biker type place, its name (in Cyrillic, of course, but demurely lazy and expensively simple - Arctic Tattoos) outlined in red neon while it's front is black and grey stripped, like a gothic tiger. The sort of place muggles take selfies outside of for their social media pages so they can pretend they have money and clout.

"Do you have an appointment?" asks the extremely good looking receptionist, a blonde who looks eerily similar to Alina, down even to the diminutive height. Astoria whispers in the back of her sister's mind, telling her to get the hell away from this web of psycho-sexual nonsense before violence erupts. Get the hell out of this strange land and return to England, where the seasons are normal and the sun goes down and rises when it should. But since when do older sisters listen to little sisters? Besides, Astoria married Draco Malfoy, of the Malfoy Malfoys, so she cannot talk.

"No, but I know Mr Karkaroff," she says, having not known till yesterday in fact, that he was a Mr Karkaroff. When she knew Yuri, his last name was something else. Apparently he'd been acknowledged and legitimised at some stage, but of course, if he had written her back, she might not have had to learn pertinent things by proxy.

The receptionist stares at her coldly, but without disbelief. An infinitude of females come through here, claiming to 'know' her boss. All she needs to do is ask him whether or not he feels like entertaining their requests for money, clout, and attention. Accordingly, she shimmies off to the back, where the buzzing of a tattoo machine sounds.

While she waits, Daphne looks round at the designs on the wall, and feels a thrill of delight and sense of destiny. Aside from the expected dark, deranged, and Durmstrangy subject matter, alongside classic Russian and sailor motifs, are flowers, tonnes and tonnes of flowers. Although she knew the quiet young man from across the sea was an artist in his extremely sparse free time, she never would have guessed that he liked to draw flowers. But she should have guessed, seeing as he is a man of taste and quality, at least most of the time.

Pointed heels clip clop across the black marble (yes, marble) floor, and a voice slides through the magically warmed air. "He'll see you."

"Of course. Cheers." Lifting the rust red frond of Digitalis sanguis she brought with her, Daphne trots off in her sensible shoes to where the magic happens, literally.

Turning the corner of a Japanese room divider made of obsidian and frosted glass of the regular sort, she comes upon a man in a black wife beater bending low over the naked back of another man, a torture device held in his gloved hand. As Daphne watches, the tattoo Yuri is applying, comes to life, and the massed snakes forming Medusa's hair begin writhing across pallid skin, her crazed eyes popping from her vicious skull, her forked tongue jutting from betwixt her lips.

"Ah!" The young woman leaps back, her body faster to react than her brain is to tell her that there is no Dark Mark here. The Dark Mark is over and done with, nothing but a white scar on her brother-in-law's forearm. Meanwhile, this other, kinned art, lives on.

Without stopping to acknowledge his visitor, the artist wipes blood from the patch he's working on, and continues, his muggle machine enchanted to infuse living ink under the skin of his very happy patron. He himself is covered with living tattoos, and the majority of them are flowers, but blackened flowers, wolfish faces, eagle eyes, and tiger stripes emerging between them. 

"I brought you something," holding out her gift, Daphne patiently waits to be acknowledged. She can wait as long as needed.

She doesn't have to wait that long, as she barged in on a man's work near the end of the session, and once the client is dressed and the next appointment is confirmed (and an appreciative glance or two is shot at Daphne) she's able to hand her extravagant bloom over.

"I screwed my life up and broke my promise, but you're giving me flowers?" Yuri asks, while staring at the spray of toxic red blooms he holds, his pose rather churlish as he remains sitting on his work chair, wife beater still visible, Russian still being used. But Daphne is not insulted, because he is inadvertently showing off why she should have travelled halfway across the world after him.

"Slytherin and Durmstrang are bosom buddies."

"That was school."

"No one ever leaves the playground, Yuri. Aaand, it could be worse." she says, dithering for a moment till he looks up inquiringly, which is when she makes a grab for his left wrist, turning the arm over. If there is a scar there, it's hidden under a spray of peonies accompanied by skulls and bones. This bed of inky death and royal beauty moves, just like the Medusa did, the peony petals fluttering in a breeze Daphne cannot feel, ghostly light flaring in the skull's eye sockets. "Hmm. Much worse," she says, dropping the arm.

A smirk quirks an artist's lips. "I never had time to be a Death Eater, unlike some."

"I guess you didn't have time to write me back either." 

"It wasn't that."

"So what was it?"

"You're smart enough to work it out, Daph." In lifting his head to smile at her, Yuri allows her to catch a glimpse of the Cyrillic blackletter poking over the collar of his vest. The top name belongs to Viktor Krum, well allowing her to imagine the names marching on lower down.

That smile and the old nickname tugs on heartstrings that don't need tugging on, and Daphne, always intoxicatingly decisive and bold, tenderly lays a hand on the back of his neck, where cervical spine meets regular spine. There's no tattoo there, leaving the area looking extremely vulnerable in comparison to the parts shielded with ink. "You can't stay here, in Norilsk. It's a bad place," she declares.

"Hmpf…No one has ever said that to me."

"I'll say it to you again, if you like."

"Hmm...alright."