It was nearing midnight on a drafty Wednesday evening in December 1977, and Lily Evans could hardly believe what she was reading.

"The first smell in my Amortentia is the smell of my parents house. Specifically: wood, old books, and my mum's cooking. The second smell in my Amortentia is my best mate Sirius' awful hair gel. If he had any bit of common sense, he'd stop wearing it completely. Or shave his head. I've suggested the latter, but he isn't amused by the idea. The third smell in my Amortentia is the rice pudding that the house elves make on Halloween and Christmas. I wish they'd make it more often. Perhaps I'll bring up the idea with Dumbledore at the next Heads meeting. And finally, the last smell in my Amortentia is Lily Evans."

Lily blinked, then blinked again. This couldn't be… this had to be a joke, right? She glanced at the top of the parchment she was holding, just to make sure she hadn't misread his name. But no, his name was right there - James Potter. And it was his handwriting. She would recognize his handwriting anywhere.

Lily Evans. So James Potter smelled her in his Amortentia - Amortentia, the potion that smells like what you love the most. And not only that, but he had written it down. On a homework assignment that he'd turned into Professor Slughorn.

She knew she shouldn't have been reading it. But she'd offered to help Slughorn organize his desk, and she'd come across the pile of essays they'd written on Amortentia the previous week, and, well, she'd just been curious! She was only interested in seeing what her friends had written! She hadn't expected to come across something… like this.

"Miss Evans?" She heard Slughorn's voice coming from the hall that led to his office. He was coming back. She shoved the pile of essays into a random drawer and turned to face her teacher, whose round silhouette appeared moments later in the doorway. "Are you still working? You should be off to bed, it's a school night!"

"It's really nothing, Professor, I just wanted to help," Lily said.

"Well, I'm demanding you go to sleep," Slughorn boomed. "I need you in top academic form tomorrow. Not that I don't have full and complete faith in you already, of course!"

"Thank you sir," Lily said, smiling feebly and trying to act as normal as possible. "I'll leave you alone, now. Goodnight."

And she left the classroom as fast as possible.

As soon as she had made it into the corridor, she collapsed to the floor. Perhaps she was being a bit overdramatic, yes, but in her defense, it's not every day that you find out that the boy who has come to be one of your closest friends - the boy who you work with for hours every day - the boy who you bloody live with - the boy who you were absolutely positive had finally gotten over his stupid childhood crush on you - still had feelings for you.

...Or didn't he?

Lily sat up from her fetal position on the hardwood.

Perhaps it was just a fluke. Perhaps his potion had malfunctioned. Perhaps he actually hadn't smelled her at all - perhaps he was just smelling her because she had been sitting only a few seats away from him in the classroom at the time. Yes, she thought to herself, relieved but also strangely empty. That had to be it. There's no way…

But he had written it down. He'd written it down, on his homework assignment. So even if he had been mistaken about what he had smelled in the love potion, he still thought it was significant enough to make a note of. He still thought there was some meaning behind it.

Lily stood up, brushed herself off, and began walking back towards the Heads tower, her heart jittery and her brain confused.

Climbing through the portrait hole into the Heads common room, she hoped desperately that James wasn't back yet so that she wouldn't have to pretend to be a perfectly normal human being around him all night, and she could continue wallowing in her fetal position in the comfort of her bedroom. Unfortunately, James was there, sitting on the couch by the fire and writing notes on a scrap of parchment. He nodded in her direction as she walked in, not taking his eyes off the parchment.

"Last-minute homework?" she asked, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible. Her voice sounded higher than normal, and she mentally cursed herself.

James scribbled a few more words on the parchment, then threw his quill onto the coffee table and leaned back, groaning and rubbing his eyes. "Not exactly," he said. "Marcel got injured at practice tonight. Shattered his femur or something. Madame Pomfrey isn't sure he'll be ready to play by Saturday's game, so I'm trying to figure out an alternate." He looked over at Lily for the first time. "Helping Slughorn again?"

"Yes," she answered shortly, trying not to think about what she'd read.

"I don't know why you do that. He already loves you, you really don't need to kiss up to his ass anymore-"

"I like helping Slughorn, for your information. He's my favorite professor. And I figure I should set a good example, you know, as Head Girl-"

James laughed out loud, his eyes twinkling in the firelight. "Wow, Evans, you sure are a laugh, have I ever told you that? There's not a single person at this school who doesn't find you worthy of being Head Girl."

"Wow, James, how very touching. I've never experienced such a nice compliment before in my whole entire life. You've truly turned over a new leaf of kindness."

"I know you're making fun of me," James said pointedly, "But I wasn't kidding. Also, what are you looking at?"

Lily snapped her head up. She'd been looking - well, staring at one of his hands, trying to imagine it holding a quill and writing her name down on a piece of homework about Amortentia. It just didn't seem realistic. At all.

"Nothing," she said, an idea suddenly coming to her. "I was just thinking about this essay I wrote, for Slughorn last week. And I'm wondering if maybe I wrote too much."

"Which essay?" he asked, standing up and gathering up his parchment and quill from the coffee table.

"The Amortentia one," she said, looking carefully to see if she could get any sort of reaction out of him. He didn't show any emotion.

"I think I wrote about 6 inches," he said, straightening up.

"Oh. Well, that's good. I wrote about that much as well," she said, nodding. "Er - how many things did you smell, then?" she asked, hoping she wasn't being too forward.

"Let me think…" he said, looking up at the ceiling. "Three or four, if I remember correctly. Slughorn said we would only be able to smell a few things the first time, remember?"

"Yeah," she said. She wondered if he would answer if she asked him directly what the things he smelled were. Then, before she could say anything, he began listing them anyway.

"Yes, my mothers cooking, Sirius' disgusting hair serum, rice pudding… I'm surprised I didn't smell my broomstick polish or something like that. Maybe I will next time."

So that was it, then. He'd listed off everything correctly - and then deliberately skipped the part about her. He was definitely hiding it for a reason. Was it the reason she thought…?

"I read your essay!" she blurted out, without thinking. "I'm sorry, it was just lying on Slughorn's desk and I read it and-"

There was a sudden disturbance as James tripped backwards onto the couch, spilling his ink all over himself. "Oh, Merlin-"

"I'm so sorry, James, but-"

"It's my fault, Lily," he said dejectedly, his eyes closed. "I shouldn't have even written it down. I didn't think anyone would see it besides Slughorn." He finally opened his eyes to look at her.. "Is there anything I say?"

Lily blinked. "What?"

"Is there anything I can say," he repeated, "to make you not hate me, I mean."

"I-" Lily stopped. She hadn't actually thought about what she would say to him if they got to this point. "I mean, well, you obviously didn't really mean it like that, did you?"

James stared at her. Lily stared back. She almost caught a hint of a confused smile on his face; perhaps he had come to the realization that she wasn't going to hex him into oblivion. "Lily," he started slowly, "you know what the Amortentia is supposed to smell like-"

"But it has to have been a mistake," she said, looking around wildly, refusing to believe what he was implying. "I mean, you don't… you don't still… do you?"

James stared at her for a moment more and then stood up again, and pulled out his wand. Lily wondered for a moment whether he was going to do something crazy like alter her memory or something, but instead, he simply turned around and began siphoning the spilled ink off the couch cushions.

Lily was flabbergasted. "You can't do that!" she said sharply.

James turned back to her, amused, and folded his arms. "I can't clean the ink off our couch?"

"You can't - you can't -" Lily sputtered incoherently. "You can't imply something like - like what you just implied - and then just refuse to acknowledge it!"

Lily hadn't realized she'd been inching closer to James throughout the conversation; now they were only a few feet away from each other and the smell of the spilled ink was suffocating her. Really, if she had any common sense she'd leave him right there and go seek refuge in the safety of her warm bedroom.

"What do you want me to say?" James asked incredulously, instinctively throwing his hands to his hair. "You already know the answer to what you're asking me."

No, she didn't. Maybe James thought it was as simple as a yes or no, but Lily knew it was all far more complex than that. Or maybe she was just overcomplicating things, like she always did.

"I want you to say you don't fancy me anymore. I want you to tell me that you didn't mean what you wrote down. So we can get back to living our lives. The way we were before."

James stared at her, bewildered, with his mouth open for almost a full five seconds, then finally spoke, very slowly. "That would be lying, Lily."

Lily sputtered with rage once again. "Who cares? Wouldn't you rather continue with us being friends than with - than with -"

"But would it really make a difference?" James asked genuinely. "You already know that I fancy you, Lily-"

"Don't say that."

"No, I am going to say it, because it's the truth. You know that I fancy you. You've known for a long time, I can tell, even if you haven't wanted to accept it. Why is it so hard to see it in writing, or to hear it from me? It isn't going to change anything."

Lily was practically shaking with anger, although, if she was being honest with herself, she truly didn't know why she was so upset, she just felt like she had to be. "It's going to change everything, James."

"See?" James exclaimed. "James. Remember when you started calling me 'James', just a few weeks ago, instead of 'Potter'? And I started calling you 'Lily'? That didn't change anything, did it? No one cared!" He suddenly walked over to her and put his hands on her shoulders, bringing the sickening scent of the ink with him. Lily wanted to throw up at the smell of it. "And besides, it's not like you're professing your love for me. Everyone knows you'll never feel the same way, so why should it matter? I'm the one who's been making a fool out of myself!"

"But what if I -" Lily quickly brought her hand to her mouth. There was an extremely tense silence in which she could almost see the wheels in James' head turning as he tried to work out what she'd almost said.

"What if you what?" he asked sharply, the smile gone from his face. Lily didn't answer. James dropped his hands from her shoulders. "What if you what, Lily?"

Lily took a few steps backwards. "What do you want me to say?" she blurted out before she could stop herself. "You already know the answer to what you're asking me," she said, copying word-for-word what James had said to her just a few minutes earlier.

She then took advantage of James' stunned and motionless silence to turn on her heel and march to her staircase, turning out the light as she went. "Goodnight," she said matter-of-factly, as if she hadn't just possibly altered her whole entire life with two sentences.

"Wait - Lily, hold on -" She could hear James stumbling around in the darkness as she walked up her staircase; evidently he had remembered how to move again. "You can't do this, Lily! Do you fancy me, Lily? Do you? Don't play games with me, just tell me the truth!"

But Lily did not answer.

It was not until the next day in Potions that Lily even saw James again. She was sure he'd been waiting for her to come outside of her bedroom in the morning, but luckily she'd had the foresight to leave the Heads tower very early in the morning, before he'd even woken up, so that she wouldn't have to face him while she tried to work out what her feelings were. He caught her eye before the Potions lesson began, his eyes wild, asking all the questions his mouth couldn't, but before he could make his way through the crowd to her, Slughorn entered the room and they were forced to sit down.

It was another Amortentia lesson. How fitting. Leaning over the bubbling cauldron in front of her, Lily was not surprised by what she smelled. Really, she'd been smelling it all along, but she'd never known what it meant.

Ripping off a bit of parchment from the roll on her desk, she scratched down a short note, charmed the parchment to fold into a paper bird, and flew it with her wand across the classroom, where it landed neatly on James' desk.

James did not have to look up to know who it was from. As he unfolded it, the handwriting inside was as familiar to him as his own. Only three words were written, but they were enough to tell him everything he wanted and needed to know.

"I smell ink."

"What does that mean?" he heard an amused voice next to him ask. "'I smell ink'. Who is that from? What's it mean?"

James looked up at Sirius, grinning wildly.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."