Amortentia
A/N: I have no idea how long Amortentia takes to make nor the ingreedients, so I'm just going with a couple of hours and some random ingredients.
Disclaimer: Anything you recognise isn't mine, unfortunately.
Lysander's POV
The Potions classroom always looked kind of creepy to me, even during the day, but when Amy and I were given permission to use it one night to practice, I knew the place would feel even weirder.
As I stood there in front of the cauldron, my potion book lying next to it and Amy by my side, I pouted a little in thought and picked up the book.
"What are we making, then?" Amy asked, peering over my shoulder at the contents page I was scanning for Amortentia. I kept my mouth shut and turned to the page the instructions were on, using my peripheral vision to catch her expression.
"Love potion?" she asked after reading the title, raising an eyebrow. "What do you need love potion for?"
I smiled and shrugged. "It's one of the advanced potions I've always wanted to try making," I replied simply. I wasn't vain enough to admit that I was well-liked among my peers, but almost everybody knew me. After all, I was the captain and best player of the Ravenclaw Quidditch Team and the only 'Claw with a backbone, unlike my stick-in-the-mud binary opposite of a twin brother who had never pushed a single boundary in his life.
Amy narrowed her eyes a little. "You're going to use me as your test-subject, aren't you?"
I gave her a patronising grin in reply and left the conversation there so I could go and get the ingredients from the store cupboard. "Right, I'll start chopping these," I said, taking some of the roots and placing them in front of me, "And you can squish these." I pushed some berries towards her and wiped my hands on my trousers before starting to chop the roots as the book instructed.
Small talk was always easy with Amy, what with her being my best friend, so we managed to uphold a conversation as we got on with making the potion. As always, the conversation swayed over to the romance side of things, which was ironically appropriate considering the potion we were making. "So what was with you and that Hufflepuff girl at lunch yesterday?" Amy asked casually as she stirred the potion for the fifth and final time clockwise.
"Nothing, we were just chatting," I replied, leaving out the part where we were obviously flirting with each other. "She wanted to talk about the Puddlemere United game last week."
"What? Who goes up to somebody they don't know to talk about Quidditch?" Amy asked disbelievingly. I'd never understood girls, despite spending most of my time with Amy, so I really had no idea how to answer her.
"I don't know. It was a good conversation, though. She's almost as enthusiastic about them as I am."
"Oh, please," Amy scoffed, "We all know the Canons will kick their arses."
I usually stuck up for Puddlemere, but I didn't want to get into a heated discussion about Quidditch, so I decided a change of subject would be good. "I think we're almost done. Everything seems to look as it should."
When we were finally finished, the potion was almost perfect. The texture was slightly different to how it described in the book, and the steam was getting confused while spiralling and kind of squiggling randomly instead. But the smell was spot on. I could smell everything I loved – The smell before rain, new books, the strange plants my mum grew at home to "keep away the Nargles", and freshly polished wood.
"What do you smell?" Amy asked, still smiling after inhaling her favourite aromas.
"Personal question, much?" I asked, mock gasping and placing a hand on my chest dramatically, making her giggle a little. "But seriously, I can smell everything I love."
"Me too," she replied happily, "I guess you're going to make me try some, now?"
I shook my head a little. "We can't be sure it's safe. It smells right, but the texture's a little off and I think we confused the steam." The latter was still confusedly moving around in every which way.
"Lysander Scamander. We could have just invented a new potion that will make us famous bajillionaires, and now we'll never know," she said, mock dramatically.
"Fine," I sighed in defeat and picked up a pipette, absorbing some of the potion into it and looking at her carefully. "One drop."
"One drop," she agreed, taking the pipette from me and squeezing a small drop onto her tongue. "Tastes fine..." she commented, "And I feel fine..."
And then she alarmingly burst into fits of spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter.
By the end of the day, we'd managed to create a completely useless potion that just made us laugh a lot for absolutely no reason, and we had a great story of the time we screwed up a love potion and ended up literally curled up on the floor of the potions classroom laughing at each other.
Never again could we the word 'Amortentia' without at least letting out a small laugh.