For Maddy ~ TheAmazingMaddy

【In which Lily and James are positive they brewed the amortentia correctly...】

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I smelt your perfume.

You smelt my shampoo.

I watched you frown as you stared into the cauldron, muttering under your breath 'Im sure we did this right?!' Because of course we had! We'd made every potion right all year, why should this one be different?

But it was.

It was very different. Because it was your perfume and my shampoo.
'What do you smell?' Slughorn had asked us, and you lean over the cauldron and you frown again, your eyebrows crinkling in the adorable way they do and I was confused. I was convinced we'd made it right too. Sometimes I found myself slipping extra ingredients into the boiling water to irk you but today I did no such thing. We followed the rules, meticulously, and we had done it well.

And yet you frown when you breathed in deeply over the cauldron (which was yours because mine had blown up last week thanks to Sirius) and then your eyes went wide and I thought you might faint. Maybe the fumes had gotten to your head?

Because it was my shampoo. My shampoo. That's what you smelt and so you fled from the room, quick as a flash, overcome with the need to escape the smell; deny it was ever there in the first place. But you'd smelt it now, there was only so much denying you could do.

I made no move to chase you –something I regret– but instead I leant over the cauldron myself and inhaled longly.

It was your perfume.

Your perfume and my shampoo. I knew I would smell it there, alongside the hot chocolate and wet grass, it wasn't something that shocked me. Not even a little bit. It had always been you, ever since day one I'd followed you around; making a fool of myself like the idiot I was– or rather am. But your perfume was always near by me. It smelt like cherry blossoms and something else that I'd never been able to place, almost like the perfume had become a part of you and made it impossible to distinguish the difference. It was just you. Plain and simple. Your perfume and my shampoo.

I followed you after that, perhaps a little late but I'd always been the same: late for just about everything. I knew where to look for you, of course. You were always in the same place when I wanted to find you; the room of requirement, or the lost and found room. It had a few names.

I found you there sobbing quietly to yourself. The room was bare, apart from an oddly shaped mirror in the corner which I was sure you were quite impervious to which confused me because the room of requirement had always been here by design. That was why you loved it so much.

'Can I hug you' I asked, slipping past the door and over to where you sat on the hardened floor. You nodded, refusing to look at me, and take your hands away from your face. I didn't mind. I held you anyway as your wracked with sobs, and 'sorries'. I held you because I loved you. Because it was your perfume and my shampoo.

It took you a while to notice the mirror in the corner of the room. You asked me if I'd clocked it, I told you I had but I hadn't looked in yet. I took your hand and we stood there together. We sat back down in front of the mirror and said nothing for a prolonged moment.

It took me longer than I cared to admit to notice your cheeks weren't tear stained in the mirror. I asked you what you saw, you said 'this. Just this.' I thought that was beautiful.

The mirror of Erised: desire. I could have had anything in the world. Arrays of things could have made themselves apparent in the mirror. Anything was possible after all, but all I saw was you, you without the tears that were currently in your eyes. That was all I wanted. Was your happiness.

I didn't tell you I loved you then. I could have but I didn't. I kept it to myself. I didn't tell you about your perfume. You didn't tell me about my shampoo.

That happened later. A month later to be precise, on an unceremonious night in January spent cuddled together on the same armchair– a perfectly normal thing for 'friends' to be doing.

I was running my hands through your hair for the millionth time, we were both staring into the fire, bewitched by its crackling and dancing.

'I think I'm in love with you,' you said, not breaking eye contact with the shadows cast across the room by the roaring fire as it whispered and smiled wryly at us with its thousands of dancing hands.

'Your perfume' I replied, still stroking your hair as trivially as we might be if we were discussing the charms essay or the weather for the up and coming quidditch match.

'Your shampoo. It's all I can think about,' you went on, telling me how you cried when you realised that day in the dungeons it was my shampoo in our cauldron (really your cauldron) and how you fled, terrified.

I told you it was okay, and that you didn't have to be scared. And so you kissed me. And I could smell your perfume. You ran your hands through my hair when we pulled apart, and tilted my head down so you could place a kiss on the top of my head. My shampoo.

I asked you to marry me on a November afternoon while we were doing something similar. However this time we were in bed, our bed, in our home. I told you the story of the mirror of Erised and how I saw you without the tears in your eyes. I was stroking your head and softly tracing the bare skin on your back.

'Marry me?' I asked, 'it doesn't have to be now. Just one day, I'd like it if you married me.' You were quiet for a while, your eyes were closed and you were breathing deeply, I thought you might she been asleep until you replied, eyes still closed...

'Okay then.'

We were married less than a month later. Just us and our friends. That was all we wanted, after all. It was perfect and it was magical and even though it was in Alice and Frank's back garden and it rained and you didn't even wear white and I still had a t-shirt on we were happy. We were irretrievably in love and we were happy, and we owed it all to a poxy cauldron that smelt of your perfume and my shampoo.

Later you told me you were pregnant. This time is wasnt absentminded and inhibited, this time it involved tears and shouting and confusion but it ended with hugs and laughter and a different kind of tears because we would be okay. We had to be okay.

And we were okay, for a while. We had our baby and nothing in the world could ruin him. He was perfect, he was ingenuous, and he was our miracle, our hero. The only thing that mattered was protecting him.

His onzies smelt like your perfume because you sprayed them before you left on a mission, and his hair smelt like mine because we used the same shampoo to clean his mop of black hair. It was comforting to me as much as it was to Harry to hold him when the nights were long when you weren't around to sing him to sleep and rest your head under my arm so I could keep you safe. That's all I ever wanted to do. Was to keep you safe.

So when he knocked on our door I knew there was no other option for me. I had to keep you safe.

'It's him!' I cried, ushering you upstairs despite your protests, telling you it would be okay. And that I loved you more than life itself.

Before you turned around for the last time you took my head in your hands and put your nose to my head. My shampoo.

It had always been you. Right from the very beginning and so when I stood there to face him, to die, I had no fear. Because I was going it for you.

The last thing I remembered was the smell your perfume on our son's onzies and how I hoped to god (if there was a god) that he would be okay. That he would be brave.

Everything I did until my dying breath when the world slipped from between my fingers I did for you and I wouldn't have had it any other way, even if it ended like this it didn't matter because it was always you.

You're perfume and my shampoo.

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