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The first snow of the year fell on a Saturday evening. Inside the Three Broomsticks, Nakamori Aoko and Kuroba Kaito were arguing over butterbeer and a pile of half‑finished fries.
"I'm just saying—with all those different potions on the Professor Slughorn's list, why Amortentia of all things?" Aoko set down her mug of hot butterbeer and fixed him with a serious look. "If someone with bad intentions stole it, who knows what could happen!"
"What, afraid someone might drink it and fall for yours truly, and you'd get jealous?" Kaito propped his chin on his hand, and before she could retort, he popped two chips into her open mouth. "Don't be silly. No one's going to steal two sixth-years' Potions homework."
Aoko chewed the crispy fried potato and swallowed her rebuttal with some difficulty.
"Who would want to fall for someone as unreliable as you?" she mumbled, the tip of her nose flushed pink from the warmth. "Wouldn't the Draught of Living Death be better? You always look like you need more sleep, Kaito."
Kaito leaned in closer, bracing his elbow against the table, his blue eyes quietly watching her. "I think studying the side effects of Amortentia suits us perfectly."
The words turned over twice in Aoko's mind, but she still didn't understand. "Why?"
"Because we're childhood friends!" He smiled, choosing his words carefully. "Even if we ended up liking each other, it wouldn't be such a terrible thing, would it?"
"Even with side effects, it wouldn't affect our relationship."
Aoko caught his meaning quickly and gave a little nod, surprisingly coming around to the idea. "That's true. We know each other so well—maybe we would indeed make pretty good test subjects!"
The butterbeer had warmed her through, and the winter wind of the Scottish Highlands rattled against the windows. Outside, boots tramped across the cobblestones of Hogsmeade. Everything about the holidays felt perfect, except for Professor Slughorn's assignment.
"Not so fast, children—Mr. Finnigan, that's quite enough—" the old wizard turned laboriously before the blackboard. "Over the holidays, in pairs, you will investigate a rare side effect of a potion of your choice." He scanned the eager or bewildered faces below.
"It may be one we have brewed in class, or something you've found in your outside reading. The rarer and more authentic, the better—though please, do keep yourselves out of the hospital wing."
"The Potions classroom will remain open during the break, and you may borrow materials from it." he added with a genial smile. "Do, however, book a time in advance, and indicate on the form exactly what you intend to brew. I would rather not have a repeat of someone using armadillo bile to accelerate their Wit-Sharpening Potion."
Suppressed snickers rippled through the room. Aoko glanced at Kaito. He had that familiar daydreaming look, but his eyes were clearly angled toward her.
Slughorn waved his wand, and a piece of parchment paper took form next to the lectern. "Two to a pair. Write your names down. Your final report must include: formula provenance, experimental records, material analysis, and a clear, well-supported conclusion."
Aoko was jotting down notes when she looked up and saw a quill appear out of nowhere, gliding deftly toward the sign-up sheet. She didn't even need to look beside her to know who had quietly written both their names side by side.
"Partner with me, Aoko," Kaito said, his tone so natural as if it should have been obvious to everyone—even though they never quite clicked in Potions class.
Once, Kaito had tried to cut corners with a stirring charm that spun the cauldron in circles, and Aoko had backed his idea. The whole batch of Swelling Solution had exploded, burned through two cauldrons, and enlarged a Gryffindor classmate's toes by five times their normal size.
"We should start early then."
Aoko rose from the worn wooden stool and straightened her robes. "I actually want to enjoy my holiday, you know. Potions classroom, eight o'clock tonight?"
He groaned. "No way! I'm not spending my evening being stared at by squid and ugly fish… For the sake of my sanity, Aoko, have mercy."
"Then where do you want to go? I mean, we have cauldrons on top of the Ravenclaw Tower, but you hate the cold…" She put on a mock-annoyed pout. "You're so difficult, Kaito. Like a child."
The "difficult one" himself pushed open the heavy oak door of the Three Broomsticks, and a gust of chilling wind swept in. Aoko was about to step out when she turned back, reached up, and rewound his scarf properly, then brushed a stray crumb of chip from the corner of his mouth with her thumb.
A smile curled at the corner of his lips—half smug, half mysterious.
"Nah," he said. "We're going to the Eighth Floor."
The Room of Requirement manifested just what they needed: a desk and two chairs, cauldrons standing quietly on the floor, quills and parchment laid out in neat rows. A wooden bookshelf held several Potions textbooks, Kaito pulled one out—its spine embossed with faded gold lettering: Amortentia: Formulations and Evolutions.
He flipped through a few pages, the paper letting out faint, brittle crackles. "Looks like some heartbroken wizard's diary," he remarked. "No way this counts as academic literature?"
"Come help me over here."
Aoko was already by the cauldron, laying out the raw ingredients one by one and examining each label. He walked over and picked up a small pouch of black round pellets, frowning. "What are these?"
"Beetle eyes." She paused for a moment.
He tossed the pouch back onto the tray with a grimace. "That's dinner ruined for me!"
"Luckily, we don't need those for Amortentia." She pursed her lips and carefully moved the beetle eyes farther away.
Brewing advanced potions was always a slow process, like a long, meandering walk. They followed the textbook's instructions: heating, stirring, diluting, as the gradually intensifying aroma spread through the room, growing soft and mellow.
Half an hour passed, Kaito suddenly frowned, leaning closer to the cauldron to sniff.
His probing look turned uncertain. "This smell… it isn't quite right."
Aoko caught the significance of his words immediately. "How do you know what the right smell is supposed to be?"
Her tone was calm, but it tinges with alertness like a searchlight. Kaito didn't answer right away. Nakamori Aoko was a clever girl; slow on the uptake when it came to emotions, but exceptionally perceptive in academics. She was acutely sensitive to anything with a clear logical thread—just perpetually a beat behind when it came to matters of the heart.
And Kaito sometimes thought that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
Professor Slughorn's voice echoed in his mind: "The scent of Amortentia differs for each person. It reflects what you find most alluring."
And of course, he knew exactly what his Amortentia should smell like. It was the scent of damp grass drifting in through an open window on an early spring morning, when the girl next door—with her slightly messy shoulder-length curls—appeared at the sill with a basket full of water balloons, asking if he wanted to play. It happened that they were the same age. It was the smell of melted salty cheese and smoked ham mixing together as Aoko took a big bite of her panini at a Muggle café during their third-year holiday.
And roses. Not the perfectly bloomed ones from the greenhouse, but the scraggly, tenacious rosebush Aoko tried to grow in the Ravenclaw girls' dormitory.
Further back—when they were fifteen, and the Black Lake ebbed at dusk, the air thick with the scent of algae and the mud caked to the soles of their shoes. Standing at the shimmering water's edge, she confessed her frustration at not being able to conjure a proper Patronus. So Kaito stayed with her, walking her through every happy memory they'd shared since childhood, until she finally succeeded.
A gentle reindeer, with his Arctic fox trotting beside it.
Kaito's Amortentia scent should probably be pieced together from all those fragments, everything tied to Nakamori Aoko.
It didn't belong to any single spice or flower, nor could it be reduced to any one season—it belonged only to her, as she was with him. It rose like a tepid tide from the cracks deep in his heart, and still, it wasn't a secret he could lay bare for the world, for now.
And none of that—he repeated, none—was floating above the cauldron before him now. Under Aoko's piercing glare, Kaito cleared his throat awkwardly, trying to cover his distraction.
"Did you add something wrong?"
Aoko bent over to peer at the silvery-white ripples rising in the cauldron. The color did indeed resemble the distinctive, mother-of-pearl sheen described for Amortentia—if not for the wisp of green smoke curling up from the surface.
Her eyebrow twitched, and she whipped out her wand. "Aguamenti!"
Water burst forth, scattering the smoke in an instant, steam hissing upward. Aoko quickly flipped through the book. "That shouldn't have happened—Ashwinder eggs, Wolfsbane, Belladonna essence…"
Kaito gently grabbed her arm. "Wait! belladonna essence? Isn't that an ingredient for Veritaserum?"
Aoko's fingers froze. She looked down and scanned the ingredient list again, then once more, her shoulders slowly slumping. Kaito watched an expression cross her face. It wasn't a frustration of failure, but more like the flustered panic of someone caught red-handed.
"Aoko." She heard him speak, his voice steady, and something in it made her feel a little hopeless. "You wanted to brew a Veritaserum. The Room of Requirement picked up on that—and gave us the wrong ingredients."
"Is there something you wanted to hear from me?"
Nakamori Aoko didn't want to meet his eyes. She hesitated for a long moment before finally speaking, her voice muffled.
"I just wanted to know if you had a crush on anyone."
"I mean—you've never been this invested in any assignments before. Especially not Amortentia." She dropped her gaze, absently casting a Scourgify on the cauldron. "It's just curiosity, really… But it's your private business, Kaito. It's perfectly fine and normal if you don't want to tell Aoko."
He fell silent. He wanted to say: Of course I like someone. She's standing right here in this room. But the words wouldn't come. Ravenclaws were masters of analysis and reasoning, they could deconstruct anything, parse every word to its bones, but when it came to confessing their feelings, they were utterly hopeless.
"Actually," he said at last, touching the back of her hand, "Well, you could have just asked me directly…"
Just as he thought she might press further, Aoko lifted her head and flashed a smile—the kind that said she was ready to brush this whole thing aside.
"We don't have time for that right now! Aoko was just a little distracted—sorry. Let's start over, shall we?"
The second attempt was a resounding success. The Amortentia took on a luminous, pearlescent sheen, like sunlight reflected off a lake after fresh snowfall. They carefully decanted the potion into two slender glass vials, sealed them tightly, and left the Room of Requirement, climbing the winding, shifting staircase up to the top of Ravenclaw Tower.
The wind was fiercer up here than anywhere else, but the air was crisp and clean, like a freshly peeled citrus fruit. Near midnight, Kaito and Aoko sat cross-legged facing each other, ready to personally test the results of their experiment.
No one knew what effect a potion brewed by two people together would produce. With no prior records to consult, practice was the only test of truth.
"Drink-up!" Kaito raised his vial, grinning with the same smug satisfaction as when he had snuck into the Hufflepuff kitchen for ice cream.
The liquid slid down his throat, smooth as diluted honey. The tower top was nearly silent, save for the wind whispering against the outer walls.
After a moment, Kaito spoke first. "Do you smell or taste anything, Aoko?"
"A very faint scent, like toasted bread, and…" She searched for the right words. "The smell of sundried linen, but it's raining outside. It's quite strange, I don't know how to describe it. "
"Do you like it?" he asked.
"…I don't dislike it," she said quietly, then turned the question back. "What about you, Kaito? What do you smell?"
He didn't answer right away. Instead, he looked at her, and his gaze gradually grew still, thoughtful.
"The Black Lake," he said. "In winter, at low tide."
Nakamori Aoko's heart fluttered. She knew exactly what he meant, or which day she should say. The evening she had finally mastered the Patronus Charm. Hearing his description, it wasn't the scene that came to mind first, but that scent—she'd just smelled also.
She had always thought that damp, brisk-but-not-too-cold fragrance was simply the smell of nature. But with one sentence, he'd pierced through the veil, and she understood that what she was experiencing wasn't so simple.
What Aoko didn't confess was that her own little vial of Amortentia had given off a scent so familiar it made her heart skip a beat.
It was the smell of sweat, more specifically, the warm steam rising from heated skin, fabric softener, and sunlight.
She didn't dare tell Kaito, because she knew exactly where it came from: back in their shared hometown of Tokyo, him weaving through Muggle streets on his motorcycle, the bike screeching to a halt at a crosswalk, him turning back to call out "Hold on tighter!"—and her blushing as she wrapped her arms around his waist.
She pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart was pounding so fast she could hear the rush of blood in her ears. Aoko should have calmly analysed this as the potion's effect, the aim of their study—but she knew better than anyone.
These hot, vivid, visceral sensations were no illusion of love conjured by magic. They were the truths she had been running away from.
Aoko quietly tucked her hands into the sleeves of her robes.
"Well then, some time has passed." she began, "Do you feel like you've become infatuated with me?"
Kaito held her glance, his eyes never wavering. He took a breath, as if drawing all the oxygen above Hogwarts into his lungs, then let it out slowly and nodded.
"Yes. I'm in love with you."
"And I don't think that feeling is going to disappear after twenty-four hours."
Then, softly, he added: "What about you?"
Aoko didn't answer right away. She closed her eyes and called to mind all the memories she associated with "love"—the same ones she turned to when casting her Patronus.
One by one, the images flickered past like frames of a film. Her Patronus was a reindeer, and Kaito's was a silver-white Arctic fox. It always loved to circle around her reindeer, sometimes leaping onto its back, tail held high with joy.
Happiness and affection were always inseparable. Being with Kaito always made me happy, Aoko thought. Only those who hold true joy in their hearts can summon a Patronus.
Since Kaito taught me that spell, doesn't that mean he's the reason I have all these rich emotions? For example, curiosity, fulfillment, happiness...
And love, for sure.
She made up her mind and reopened her eyes to meet his.
"I like you too. And it's not because of the Amortentia."
Two weeks later, Aoko stared at their marked report that had landed on her desk, the corner of her lips twitching.
"We only got Acceptable?"
Kaito leaned over for a look and let out a low whistle. "Even the Slytherin pair who copied off a peculiar textbook overnight did better than us."
Their assignment had been marked down, especially in the "Validity" section, where Professor Slughorn had scrawled a note in green ink:
"Participants already held mutual affection prior to the experiment. Such variable could not be independently isolated to demonstrate the potion's effects. Assessment rendered inaccurate; unable to effectively conclude Amortentia's function."
It's true that Amortentia cannot fabricate feelings that already exist. Others had verified it before, and curious witches and wizards would no doubt rediscover the same conclusion in years to come.
Kaito shrugged and offered her some consolation. "Our grade might be low, but our conclusion is one of a kind."
She was about to roll her eyes at him, but then she found herself remembering that moment on the tower, in the twilight, when he'd given her the answer she'd been waiting for.
"You're right," Aoko smiled, "Amortentia has nothing on us."