Standard disclaimer applies.
June 2024 - June 2025
Scorpius' first text message comes three days after graduation. Rose smiles at the irony of it, and wonders if he's doing this on purpose. He's vacationing with his mates in the south of France and he sends her photos of the beach, the sea, and adorable cobblestone streets lined with quaint houses. She responds with photos of geysers and dramatic landscapes – her family is vacationing in Iceland. They exchange pleasantries but the majority of their exchange consists of photos from where they are, and unspoken wishes that the other was there. But by the end of the summer they each feel that they are a little closer to friends than they were previously.
When Rose starts her internship at the Piccadilly Urban Shelter for Magical Creatures, she finds that the work is significantly more high pressure than she had expected. It's true that Hagrid prepared her exceptionally well for the technical aspects of the job, but there are just SO MANY creatures that require attention and a great deal of care. The city is not a forgiving place for magical creatures who are more suited to quiet mountains, forests, open fields, lakes and rivers. One day the team even recovers a partially metamorphosed fire frog in a gutter.
Each time a new animal comes in to the shelter, several groups are mobilized: one to ready the accommodations for the creature and one consisting of medical veterinarians. Preparing creature enclosures is significantly easier for small animals, but thanks to technology developed by and still in use from Newt Scamander's day, space is unlimited. However, wrangling larger creatures into the small magical opening often proves a challenge. The medical team assesses the creature's state, determines what degree of medical attention is required, and begins the administration, all while attempting to coax the animal into an appropriate holding pen. The crew who brought the animal usually hurriedly rush through paperwork before leaving the facility to respond to another report of a magical creature on the loose – and there are never shortages of these.
During Rose's two-week training period, she rotates with every group, spending a day or two shadowing each job. The purpose of this rotation period is twofold: first for the facility administrators to determine which group she would be most helpful with, and second for Rose to determine which group she most prefers joining, with heavier preference given to the first option. Three of the new interns are placed with creature retrieval, two relatively more well-traveled interns with experience in ecology are placed with the habitat development team, while Rose, with her steady hands and extensive training from Hagrid, and one other are placed with the medical team, doing the most basic tasks of calming the creature and creating simple splints.
Rose and the other interns quickly settle into the routine at the shelter, or as much of a routine that they are able to find in the mad hectic rush of taking care of magical creatures lost in the city. Even on days when relatively fewer new creatures come in to the facility, there is always something to do – checking up on the state of the current residents, tidying occupied spaces, maintaining the inventory for the facility, returning recuperated individuals to their natural habitats or creature preserves, and cleaning out recently vacated spaces, just to name a few. But Rose loves it – she enjoys getting to know her colleagues during their brief moments of respite, learning their motivations for staying in this line of work; she delights every time a creature is deemed well enough to return to its original habitat; and she marvels in the huge diversity of creatures that she attends to. Life finds a way, she muses, when thinking about the dingy conditions in the city and the way these creatures were living before they came to the facility.
There is one aspect of this work that she has trouble reconciling, though. She knows it's inevitable that not all creatures will make it: sometimes their injuries are just too severe, and often the team is stretched too thin to give the creatures the attention they need.
The first time that a creature passes away when Rose's team is attending, she goes home to her shared flat with her cousin Albus and cries for half an hour before texting Scorpius.
R [1801]: Hey, how's your day?
S [1809]: Tiring… I'm currently on a short break. We're building today. Well. We build every day. This week we're plumbing. I don't know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't this. Not that this is bad. It's like, we made plans to increase these folks' access to potable water, and we're putting in a couple wells, but we're in a bit of a conflict with another team because it turns out that the folks out here don't really have permanent shelters, so the other team out here has construction plans and materials, so we've been helping with the grunt work of the construction before we can get started on our wells and phew. It's just been really crazy. I'm glad you messaged, I thought I was going crazy.
S [1810]: Enough about me. How are you?
R [1815]: I'm also glad that I messaged you. Some perspective is nice sometimes… Today was the first time a creature died in my care, and I've been crying.
S [1817]: Oh hey I'm so sorry to hear that… Would you like to speak over the phone?
R [1818]: That would be really nice, but I don't want to take you away from your work helping people…
S [1819]: We usually stop working around 1600h local time, so if you're still awake in 3 hours, we could do that?
R [1821]: Yes, sure, that will work great for me. I'll cook dinner in the meantime.
At 21:11 Rose's phone rings and she nearly falls off the couch in her hurry to pick it up. Albus looks at her strangely as she all but sprints into her bedroom and closes the door.
"Hey," she breathes into the phone.
"Hi Rose," comes Scorpius' voice. "How was your dinner?"
Rose feels herself tearing up. "It's so nice to hear your voice," she says as soon as she can without choking up.
Without missing a beat, Scorpius responds in kind. She can hear the smile on his face. There's another pause until Rose remembers the question he posed initially.
"Dinner was good. I made a chicken and wild rice dish with extra spice." She laughs. "It's always fun to watch Al fight with his love of flavor and his inability to handle any heat whatsoever. Plus I've got leftovers for lunch tomorrow."
They shoot the breeze for a couple minutes more until Scorpius says, "So. Tell me."
And Rose does. Scorpius makes conciliatory noises when Rose's waterworks start again, and he patiently talks her through her feelings, asking why she feels that it's a personal failing, how her colleagues respond to creature passings. She responds that she suspects that many of her colleagues lose bits of their humanity each time this happens, walling off their emotional selves from their work so they at times appear brutal in the efficiency of the motions they take for work; others turn to substances to dull the pain, and others have spoken about having a lifeline, something to ground themselves when they encounter instances such as this. She confesses that she's afraid of either of the first two happening to her, and she has great fear about entrusting herself to any other person to the extent that the third demands. Eventually Rose runs out of things to say about this, and finds that she feels lighter. Still sad, but less burdened and less alone in this horrible progression of life and death.
They continue talking about little things, catching up, gossiping, telling jokes until Rose can't keep her eyes open anymore and she resignedly has to tell Scorpius that she has an early morning tomorrow, but thanks so much for listening (she somehow doesn't think this conversation would have been as productive as if it had been with a cousin), and she'd really like to call again sometime.
She writes about this in her personal statement for her application to dragon keeping academy. She vividly describes the creature, the rush to stabilize the creature's condition, the quiet when they realize they've failed, the feeling of not having time to mourn before having to move on to the next patient. Most of all, Rose writes about this being the moment that she realized she would either have to give up her humanity – walling off her heart to not feel loss when each future animal died – or finding something, someone, a friend, a community to ground her and help her heal. Because, after all, death is inevitable, but this ending inspires her to make the most of her every day, and to help other creatures live full, healthy lives.
She is admitted and prepares to move to Romania the next year.