First thing I've posted. Slight AU because I'm only seen the first three seasons. Hopefully more to come. Language should remain tame, but sex will be discussed in detail but no actual sex scenes. Also I own absolutely nothing. Thank you for your time!
Some thoughts on Helia and Flora
Compared to the other girls, Helia and Flora lived a very simple life, but they were also arguably the busiest of them all.
Surprisingly, they had stayed in Magix after they'd graduated. Everybody had expected them to go back to Flora's realm, but the two had decided against it. They'd found an old, abandoned apothecary shop on one of the calmer streets of town and they'd both fallen in love with it immediately. Flora loved the old world charm and character it had, as well as the greenhouses that encircled the back patio and garden; while Helia loved it's convenient location and it's potential for them to make it whatever they wanted it to be.
It was set on a good amount of land, nestled into the part of town where businesses and residential buildings flowed seamlessly together and the couple enjoyed being able to walk into town to get dinner at one of the restaurants and do their shopping before walking back home and escaping to their own little paradise.
It had taken them awhile to get the place fixed up, but they'd done all of the work themselves (with a little bit of help from the rest of the gang when they'd finally found out what they were doing), and they were very proud of it. In fact, some of their favorite memories were of the two of them laughing and sharing pizza on a plastic drop cloth with the smell of wet paint in the background (Flora), or of Helia sitting and listening to Flora ramble animatedly about what plants she was going to put where as they cleaned the garbage out of the green houses (Helia).
They converted the old shop front into a small cottage for the two of them to share. It wasn't the most luxurious place in the world, but with the extra space out back in the gardens, it fit the two of them of comfortably, and the two of them enjoyed spending most of their time outside anyway. It was a two story, two bedrooms, one and a half bath, with a kitchen and a living room.
The kitchen was big compared to the rest of the house, but neither of the two minded. Both Helia and Flora enjoyed cooking, especially together, and they appreciated having the proper space to store things and move. They'd nestled a four person, wooden table into the corner by the bay window, but they'd forgone a formal dining room. They didn't have the space for it, and quite honestly, neither of them had a much of a desire to host parties of guests either.
They did invite people over occasionally (especially Riven and Musa) and they enjoyed it, but they wanted their paradise to stay their paradise, not everybody else's paradise they happened to live in.
Flora had insisted on the spare bedroom, though. She'd wanted her little sister to have her own room if she wanted to come visit (she did every chance she got), and have an extra bed in case somebody came to them for help. Helia hadn't tried to persuade her otherwise, he'd just let her get through her practiced speech (and the ten minutes of nervous rambling after that), before he'd agreed that she had a point and suggested that they added another half-bath so whoever it was didn't have to wake them up in the middle of the night to use their en suite.
What Helia hadn't had the guts to tell her was that he had much bigger hopes for the room than just her sister or whichever one of their friends needed a bed to crash on for the night. But then again, that conversation would come later.
Stella had a field day helping Flora decorate the house. Both Flora and Helia had refused her offers at first, this was something that they wanted to do together, but Stella was having none of it. This was an opportunity to shop and she was not passing it up. Besides, she had unlimited access to the royal coffers now, plus the generous budget that Flora and Helia had to work with (more on that in a minute).
Despite what a lot of people thought though, Stella did know Flora and Helia pretty well, and she did conceptually understand that this was their thing and that they wanted to make it a bonding experience ("or whatever," as Stella had explained to Brandon).
So, she went out and bought a bunch of stuff and sent it to Flora and Helia and let them pick and choose what they wanted to keep and what they wanted to send back. It had confused and annoyed Flora and Helia when the packages first started arriving, but Flora opened them because she didn't want to be impolite, and she was surprised by how much she actually liked the stuff that Stella had picked out. There were definitely pieces that screamed more of Stella's style than their own, but for the most part it was all neutral tones and light and airy and exactly what they were going for. Still, she'd sent all of them back on principle.
Helia was surprised too, but he hadn't even considered keeping anything until he'd heard Flora gasp from the other room and ran in to find her unwrapping a beautiful stone easel with flowers etched into pieces that would look marvelous in the back garden and he instantly caved. The couple simply could not refuse it, and they'd very tentatively agreed to keep a couple more of the pieces that Stella sent their way over the next couple of days.
Once Stella had gotten confirmation that they'd agreed to keep something she'd sent them, the packages really started coming in earnest. She hadn't even bothered to remember what all they'd kept and what all they'd returned, other to keep an eye on the budget and smirk when she saw that they had, indeed, kept the easel.
Flora and Helia fell in love with this new form of "shopping" very quickly and pretty soon, Flora was calling Stella up and making requests for things that she and Helia wanted.
Flora and Helia did almost as much work outside as they had inside (if not more), but the gardens were the whole reason they'd bought the property in the first place. Flora had wanted to be somewhere that she could work with nature. And while Helia didn't particularly care if they were a direct part of the surrounding ecosystem or not, he did like being in nature and surrounded by natural things, and he knew that having more plants around made Flora more powerful, especially when she was well in-tune with those plants, and he wanted that for her.
Neither of them minded either. They both enjoyed the work.
Structurally speaking, two of the greenhouses were fine. There were a couple of cracked windows and the doors needed replacing, but aside from needing to be cleaned out and repainted, they didn't require too much renovation.
The third wasn't so lucky. The plants left inside had overgrown violently when the last owner had abandoned them, and ripped one of the corners off of the roof in the process. The offending plants had long since died (something that broke Flora's heart), but the missing section of roof had exposed the entire inside to the elements. It had taken almost twice the amount of time to clean it out (with Flora having to do most of the work because some of the plants had spawned and mutated and tried to kill Helia), and Helia and Flora had ultimately decided to pull the walls down and start from scratch when they realized just how much damage had actually been done to the old wooden frame.
The unanticipated work had provided quite a fun weekend with Musa and Riven though!
They hadn't planned on working on it together; Musa and Riven were just in town to catch up when Musa asked what all they had left to do. Flora had told her about the greenhouse and what all it was going to take and that unfortunately they were probably just going to call in a professional to do it (it really was a big project, especially for two people, and they were both being called away more and more frequently for jobs, and it would take three or four weeks for them to get everything done at least) but Musa was having none of that.
She declared that she and Riven were going to help them finish it before they left.
Both Flora and Helia had tried to argue but Riven agreed with Musa and true to her word, the greenhouse was done before they left three days later. It had been a lot of hard work, and a professional probably could have done a better job, but it was fun, and it would stand, and they'd still done it themselves.
The patch of grass that sat in between the three greenhouses had been cut and tamed by Flora in a little under half a day. The trees had been pruned, and the open gardens were quickly overflowing with flowers and vegetables and plants of all sorts and kinds, just like the greenhouses surrounding them. Some of the fruits of her labor, Flora sold to make a little extra money, some they kept in their own stores to either eat or use in potions, and some were placed in vases or left to flourish in the gardens just because they thought the were beautiful.
Helia laid stone paths between the four structures and the benches placed around the gardens, and it really was beautiful. It was their own little paradise in the middle of the city, and the only complaint either one of them had was that they couldn't see the stars because of the light pollution from the city around them.