July 10th, 1895 - Skeeter Residence

Gemma was already emotionally and physically exhausted from yesterday and the few days before. She'd known when she'd taken this endeavor on for Mrs. Skeeter that it would be a lot of work, but she owed it to Professor Skeeter to see it through. It was obvious he hadn't been home much, the house felt hollow, but Gemma was staying there without cost as long as she cleaned it up and cleaned it out for sale in the coming months, so she had no room to complain.

She hadn't found the fortitude to start on the inside, it felt horribly real once she started in the rooms that were not hers, so she stuck to the outside in the garden where she was far more at home. Gems had tended to his gardens when he was at school for the year, when she was in town anyway so this was familiar, easy, even if they'd been somewhat neglected. Gemma enjoyed a good physical pursuit over anything else. Being physically exhausted was preferable to the emotional set to her thoughts.

Petal was carefully tucked into a basket that served as a good place to take a nap. The baby opossum hadn't meant to be something she brought back with her, but it was hard to say no to her magizoologist friend who already had a lot on her plate. They'd been deep in the Appalachian mountains studying magical flora and fauna in tandem when they'd come across her and then Gemma had been summoned home shortly after. Unfortunately Petal had grown attached and so Gemma had agreed to take her while she was back in Hogsmeade. For the moment she was content to snooze after being fed, so Gemma was attacking the weeds in the garden with a vengeance, pulling and snipping and cleaning out the beds near the little picket fence by the road.

As she stood up to move to another garden bed, she noticed a familiar figure coming down the street and she smile softly, waving with one gloved hand. "I was hoping I'd run into you while I'm in town." She sighed, genuinely meaning it. It was a terrible reason that she was home and she didn't know how long she could stay, but she wanted to squeeze in seeing as many people as she could and she always worried about Theo a little bit when she was gone.

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Theodore Gallivan

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   Theodore Gallivan

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The streets of Bartonburg were a fairly consistent, mundane place to be, so Theo could walk them practically without thinking – but the person who had waved to him over a nearby picket fence was always an unexpected face nowadays.

“Gemma,” Theo said, a bright grin coming to his face in greeting without any prompting needed; she was too cheerful a person not to want to smile at. “You’re back!” Except – his eyebrows drew together slightly – she was back unexpectedly, and she seemed a little subdued in her expression, and by the time Theo had crossed over to the fence, he had realised just whose property in the neighbourhood it was. Had been.

She was taking the garden to task, anyway, garden tools and a basket and piles of plants around her – Theo opened the garden gate and gestured at her weeding. “Can I help?” He asked seriously – half because if she was here then he obviously wanted to see her, and half because turning over the plant beds looked like a satisfying, all-consuming sort of activity. Theo was no gardener, but he understood the lure of a hands-on activity, something physical to chase out one’s thoughts. And if this was the Skeeter house, well –

He really hoped Gemma could put up with some company.

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   Gemma Simpson

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Gem watched in mild amusement, mixed with relief as the realization crossed Theo's features. Her smile was soft and his offer surprised her, but delighted her even more. "Yes, please." Her voice was a little tight and she tried to shake it off, but found it harder than she would like. She had done this countless times in the past, had always helped Professor Skeeter keep his yard organized when she was home and available, but this time was too different. She could keep her hands busy, but her mind kept wandering to why she was here and everything that had pulled her back to Hogsmeade.

"Will you pull all of the tall grass that has sort of wormed its way into the wildflowers?" She motioned to a section next to where she was, and showed him which weeds she meant for him to pull. She had some lilies to separate and hopefully rehome, so she reached for the shovel, letting an amiable silence fall between them for a few minutes.

It was enough for her to collect her jumbled thoughts and so she put on a better smile. "And how're you? Things going alright?" It had been a couple of years at this point since she'd been able to have a real conversation with him and surely he'd been busy.

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She was much, much quieter than usual, but maybe that was no surprise, given the circumstance. That was perfectly fine – Theo had never been good enough at serving out happy platitudes to fill the silence that bloomed either, but at least she’d given him something to do.

He might not have been able to tell the tall grass from said wildflowers until she showed him, but then he did find a savage satisfaction in ripping the stray invaders out right from the roots. Clearing the space in front of him did seem to assist, weirdly, in clearing the space in one’s head, and Theo had just shifted positions, to try kneeling on the ground more comfortably, rather than stooping and bending down to the weeds all the time, when Gemma found her voice again.

“Yeah, I’m alright,” Theo answered, non-committal but not so miserable as he fancied he had been last time she had seen him, that New Year’s she’d been back; in fact, in contrast to the day and the miserable circumstances she was obviously in, clearing out a dead man’s garden, his alright might even sound modestly optimistic. “And how about –” he started, eyeing her sidelong in turn, and then, when his gaze caught on some oddly-inhabited basket by her side, in his bewilderment, the question went off-track. “Hang on, what is that?”

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Theo tackled the weeds with enthusiasm and Gemma had to chuckle quietly as he pulled them right out by the roots. It would save her quite a bit of time. Once everything was weeded to satisfaction, she had free reign to split and propagate to her heart's content, which would be quite a bit. She could take some over to Mrs. Skeeter's and put them in her garden and even maybe take some home for the side yard.

The lilies were proving difficult, as she expected, but she had to stop and look at what it was that had caught Theo's attention so abruptly. She looked up and saw it was Petal, still snoozing in her basket that had caused the question. "Oh, that's Petal. She's an opossum from the States." Gemma had always had a fondness for creatures that were a little weird and different and she was doing her friend a favor, so it wasn't all that bad. Plus Petal was so sweet. "I was in the Appalachian mountains on the east coast with a large group that consisted of herbologists, magizoologists, potioneers and other various -ists." Gemma couldn't think of the right word, so she went with that. "I was helping to raise her while we were there, but I had to leave," to come home, to take care of this in the wake of the disaster. "So I brought her with me." Gemma thought she was very cute, but supposed looking at her straight on, she might be a little alarming.

"She's harmless, and just a baby and thankfully sleeping." Opossums were lovely to take care of, Gemma thought, but this one did have quite a bit of energy when awake. And she was a little clingy, but that was normal, given that the joeys often were carried about by their mothers as the clung on to her back.

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His bewilderment at the creature had been very real, but a side effect of it was that Gemma had started talking, or at least enough to grant him an actual explanation. Because opossum had meant precisely nothing to him until right now.

Theo pulled a face at she’s harmless, because he hadn’t been afraid of her; she was tiny, and certainly still sleeping in that basket, and if she was always like that it made sense that Gemma would have managed to travel all the way back from America with her without trouble. He didn’t know what opossums usually looked like, but... “No offence to Petal, but it – sorry, she – looks like a rat with overgrown ears,” Theo quipped, since she did look a little ridiculous, with a tiny head and giant whiskers and misfit ears. Cute, maybe – but she was asleep and hopefully didn’t understand humans making fun of her, so make fun of her he would. And if it made Gemma laugh or enraged in Petal’s defense, so much the better. Sombre quietness simply didn’t suit her.

He had had to chuckle at her comment about ists. So she had found her own crowd of misfits on her expeditions – that was a good thing. She had always seemed to like where her life had taken her – she had a new adventure to tell every time – but Theo was glad it wasn’t necessarily lonely out there. He had been grinning faintly at picturing the scenario, a bunch of nerds out there and odd little creatures like Petal snoozing around them, but had to leave, and her being here in Skeeter’s garden, brought him back to earth. “I’m sorry about –” Theo nodded his head at the house to say the professor; he wasn’t sure how close Gemma had been to him (obviously, they had Herbology in common, and she was helping out here) but he had been sorry to hear about Professor Skeeter’s death too.

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