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Tybalt was in a particularly agitated mood today.
Not that he wasn’t at least the tiniest bit agitated every second of every day that he was stuck at this god awful English boarding school with god awful people. Out of everyone in Verona that barn owls had decided to flock to like ants around insect corpses, the universe had seemed to have played some insulting trick on him specifically. Because not only had his cousin, Juliet (who, on her own, could be incredibly irritating some days), been the only feasible company he knew, but the others were practically barn owls themselves – at least, in his humble opinion.
Fucking Montagues. And, of course, with them came Mercutio Escalus – the pest of his home city that, no matter how much he flicked, would simply not go away.
However, despite the knee-deep bullshit he was paralyzed in, that wasn’t the thing currently ticking him off. Tybalt had learned very quickly that in this place, this location, this hellhole – if you will, that if nothing ever went wrong in your life, you were already much better off than literally everyone else that went here. Stories were constantly passed around glossy long tables of dark wizards and evil parents (pretty understandable) and bogeys and vampires and hexes – really, Tybalt could only be shocked that alcoholic beverages were strictly prohibited here. Seemed like everyone was off-their-shit drunk.
And today, the madmen are teaching him how to brew potions.
And Mercutio fuckin’ Escalus is his partner. He should really start skipping Slytherin-Hufflepuff paired classes.
“Love potions,” Professor Slughorn calls out in that sickeningly booming voice of his. “Potent stuff. Powerful, powerful substance – twists your bones and your blood and every bitty nerve ending in your body to fall in love with someone that your heart doesn’t really beat for. If a love potion’s beat you to the punch, you won’t know it, either. Completely inconspicuous. Someone slips a tiny bit into your flask, you’re head over heels in love and you always have been and always will be – or so you think.”
Tybalt shivers as he feels Mercutio’s breath hit his earlobe as he leans in to whisper. “Wouldn’t need a love potion to get someone to fall head over heels for me.”
The Capulet can hear the shit-eating grin in his voice. And loathes it.
“I don’t think people fall in love with pests, Mercutio.” Tybalt mumbles.
“Oh, really?”
Teeth are gritted at the suggestiveness in the soft aeration of Mercutio’s tone through his ear. “Yes, really.”
The Escalus shrugs with the faintest yet and retreats before Slughorn can take notice. “If you say so.”
Their professor carries on cheerily. “Today, we will be brewing the most powerful, most potent love potion in all of existence. Her name? Amortentia – the drinker of this potion falls completely, irrevocably in love, that is, if you can really call the effects of Amortentia love. At its utmost essence, at first glance, the effect is love, however Amortentia’s potency spirals and devolves into something almost carnal; I don’t quite know the word. It’s infatuation, obsession, and the one whom the drinker falls in love with becomes the sole center of their world, much like a sun. Dangerous, volatile love. Obsession as a word does not quite cut it.”
The whole room is silent at the pure level of darkness Slughorn’s words reach towards the end of his lengthy monologue. A student with dark brown curls raises their hand, at which they are promptly pointed at by the professor as if nothing had happened.
“Professor? Are we – um, drinking it, then?”
“Drinking it?” Slughorn booms out as if that were the most incredulous thing he’s ever heard despite having implied they would. “Heavens, no! I would rather simmer you lot in bubbling acid than subject you to the effects of Amortentia, and it sounds wrong, but you’ll find you wish so too. No, no, we’ll be smelling the stuff. Other than its effects, the potion smells to the drinker of what they find most attractive about their true soulmate.”
Swoons echo across the limestone walled, dungeon-adjacent potions classroom. Tybalt thinks this is a load of bullshit.
“Alright! That quite settles it. Allow me to demonstrate before you all get into it.” Professor Slughorn steps off and, in a few paces, settles behind his own workbench at the very front of the vast classroom, and sets off into a mess of disgusting looking ingredients and delighted rambles. The other students took an immediate trance to what he was doing, all likely hoping he’d give them the first sniff of this supposed magic love potion. Really, the Capulet could laugh — all of this? Loads and loads of nothing. He watches on, but only to find a slip in the pace, some sort of living evidence that this was bullshit.
“What do you think your Amortentia would smell like?” He jolts as Mercutio’s soft-spoken but sharp whisper is back in his ear. He takes a deep breath — unintentionally, Mercutio’s scent fills his nose and creeps into his senses; it was the smell of alcohol and a wealthy man’s perfume. Any thought of him liking it is pushed away into the back of his mind.
He shrugs. “Probably going to smell like nothing. This class feels meaningless.”
“Well, that’s too bad.” Mercutio sighs in a tone Tybalt knows is nothing like what it might have sounded like. “I would have wanted to know who Tybalt Capulet’s true love is. More so, what they smell like. Do you think they smell good? Come on, tell me anything. Any scent on your mind at all.”
“Like shutting up.”
“So it’s me then?” The Escalus has to add, because of course he does.
“Of course not.” Tybalt grits harshly, but he doesn’t realize his heart begins to betray him. Beneath Slughorn’s droning, beneath Mercutio’s whispers — something was beating. He pushes every thought, every tiny inkling to burn in the fire in the darkest pit of his stomach, but right now it feels as if instead of getting rid of those tinier inklings, they’ve completely evolved into kindling for a flame he didn’t exactly need to be kindled. At least, he hopes it didn’t need to be kindled. But he shoves it down like he always does, clears his throat, and acts as if he was as spiteful as ever.
Mercutio gives him a look. “But would it really be that crazy?”
“Yes.”
“You really think so?”
“Yes.”
“And why is that?”
Tybalt gives him a look. “Do I not make it clear enough how I feel about you right now?”
“Well, you’re my Potions partner right now.” Mercutio shrugs, and Tybalt thinks he’s really just that stupid until he sees the tiny grin fighting for its place at the corners of Mercutio’s mouth, and he realizes that Mercutio may be an idiot of the highest order, but any of his advances are deliberately crafted and perfectly intentional, down to the last word. The Escalus knows he drags something out of Tybalt that he would prefer to keep within his body, and he knows every little detail in between that.
“Not by choice.”
“But you’re here now. Don’t you think we should make the best of the time we have to spend together, Tybalt?”
“I’d rather spend it wishing it would go by faster.”
Mercutio clicks his tongue. “I know you don’t mean that.”
“I do.” The Capulet deadpans. “I mean every word.”
“And what about the words on the days where you decide you hate me so much that you whisper a bunch of sweet nothings into my ear, and smile when I laugh at the jokes that you never make?” Mercutio gives him the worst smile he’s ever seen in his life. “What about those days, Tybalt? The boat to Hogwarts? Sneaking Romeo and Juliet into the Slytherin common room because you’re the only one that knows how? Whispering exactly the way you are now?”
Tybalt fumes in a shade of pink. “Those aren’t sweet nothings. You’re delusional.”
“So — what, you’re turning pink because they aren’t, then?”
“Fuck off.”
“Alright, at last — this is the best bit, everyone, listen in — here we have the fabulous Amortentia. Look closely, my dear pupils, as this powerful potion can be identified by its rosy pink hue and its iridescent golden trails, almost reminiscent of memories in a pensieve. Go on, look very closely.” The professor speaks erratically, letting his eyes trail up to the waft of rose-gold smoke emanating from his tiny heart-shaped vial in his hand. “That right there, that smoke you’re seeing — the smell of love. The true scent of what one admires most about their soulmate.”
Students swoon and bump forward to try and get a closer look at the potent concoction in his hands. He can hear his cousin and her Montague lover giggling at the workstation behind him, he can hear Mercutio’s breathing waft from his lips, he can hear laughs and gossip of what their Amortentia would smell like — he hears it all, and he wants to cover his ears.
“Well. I’ll need one volunteer to come up and sniff the thing.” Slughorn states. “Do we have any volunteers?”
Hands go flying up from all across the room. The professor doesn’t look satisfied with any of his options.
“No, no — oh, Merlin, no —” Professor Slughorn’s eyes travel sporadically across the room, giving expressions of resentment and disgust at the pool of fish he’s been given to fish from. The air is thick with the disappointment of concealed couples, all of which wishing to validate their undying love for each other, with the scent of nothing but eagerness and desperation to know who their soulmates are. Deep inside, Tybalt burns the same way, but right now he’s more focused on making sure Slughorn pays him no attention whatsoever.
And as soon as he thinks about it, the professor’s eyes land from their lengthy flight.
Right on him.
Shit.
“Mr. Capulet, I believe? Italian transfer student, quiet, brooding — yes, yes, come up to the front please.”
Tybalt is frozen in place — the booing and groaning of the students behind him fading out into the background of the scene. Because of course he has to make things worse for himself.
“Tybalt,” Mercutio mutters in his ear. “I believe you’re being called as a volunteer.”
“Am I?” The Capulet grits sourly. His eyes flicker over to the man in front of the classroom, bumbling and expectant and holding in his hand a colored pink vial that might potentially destroy all of Tybalt’s worldviews and everything he’s ever known about himself. In the chasm of his mind, everything has an echo. Everything lingers. And right now, inside, everything’s ringing so much he feels he might be in an auditorium with an awful sound system.
A hand is on his back in an instant, shoving him to the front. He’ll kill Mercutio. He’ll
slit him open, carve his bones out —
“Wonderful! Here you are, Mr. Capulet. Just one sniff. Feel free to tell us what you smell, feel free not to.”
The vial is shoved under his nose, and Tybalt doesn’t know if he wanted to inhale so deeply, or if his brain had forced him to, but the scent is something indescribable; it was potent, it was real, and it was intoxicating.
He’d expected something artificial — something, despite its trials and efforts, would be nothing remotely close to the real scents of whatever he smelled. But Amortentia was real and it destroyed him from the inside out with how reminiscent of the reality it was. Sweetness danced on the bridge of his nose, into closed eyes, into his breath, into his lungs, and he didn’t think he would ever experience anything like it again.
“Good, huh?” Slughorn remarks. “Well, go on, Mr. Capulet. What do you smell?”
The scent itself was sickly — too mild to be absinthe, too stingy to be white wine. Then it was sweet and dark and reminiscent of cologne, reminiscent of the wealth of Verona and the perfumes and scents counts and countesses and close acquaintances of the Prince or of his aunt and uncle wore. The smell of the potion singed the air that entered his nostrils but healed the burns as it drifted inwards, and for a minute Tybalt tries and tries to determine where he’s smelled it before — until he does.
And his whole body lights on fire.
“I —” He stumbles on the word, contemplating whether to say it or not. “Alcohol — Alcohol, and a wealthy man’s perfume.”
“Interesting. Quite interesting, really. Thank you, Mr. Capulet, that’s all from you. You may return to your workstations to pack up.” Slughorn booms. “Unfortunately, time does not see it fit that you brew the Amortentia yourselves, so we shall pick up on this at our next class. Feel free to read ahead in your textbooks. You are dismissed.”
The entire classroom is enveloped into a fit of whispers and giggles, and as Tybalt steps warily back to the workstation where the Escalus is looking at him with pleased eyes and crossed arms, everyone’s gazes burn holes into the back of his robes. There’s an aura in the room, but the Capulet really couldn’t give less of a shit about anyone else — he’s stuck in his own head, a constant cycle of denying what had just happened, repressing the memory of where he’s undoubtedly smelled alcohol and a wealthy man’s perfume, pushing a whole truckload of inklings into the fire.
But that only makes it burn brighter, and it swallows him whole as he shoves his items into his school bag and dashes out of the godforsaken classroom.
Since he knows exactly who he smelled, and he knows it.
Mercutio.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Juliet laughs from the other side of the door.
Tybalt is currently hiding in the Hufflepuff common room broom closet due to the relentless teasing that the entire Amortentia affair had dragged out from his little cousin (see? She could be unfathomably irritating if she really wanted to be) and had refused to talk to Mercutio since it had gone about. His mind was still reeling, pulsating like a heartbeat and trying so hard to alter the memory into one where he didn’t so obviously smell his fatal enemy in the love potion that didn’t lie to its drinker.
“Tybalt, come on. You know, I think it’s cute that you smelled him in your Amortentia. And it was the reality check you absolutely needed, what with all your saying you hate him and saying you want to kill him when you really can’t stop thinking about him.”
“You’re unhelpful.” He yells back, absolutely knowing that his little cousin was right but absolutely not wanting to admit it.
“Besides, you’re going to have to talk to him eventually, you know. He's been coming over the whole day, asking Romeo if you were around.” When Tybalt breathes and intentionally doesn’t respond as a means of waiting for the next stupid and meaningless and completely true thing that Juliet states, she sighs loudly and goes on with exactly what he was expecting. “You know how hard it is to cover for you? Can’t you just face the music, go out there, and talk to your true love about the fact that he’s your true love?”
“He is not my true love! Not now, never in a million years.”
“Slughorn said it himself, the potion doesn’t lie.” Juliet shoots back, and he really, really hates that she’s not wrong whatsoever in this whole interaction. “Come on, don’t deny it — it’s cute! You should have seen your face when you figured out exactly who you were smelling, you were all pink and wide eyed like a worm who’s just hit rock bottom in a plant pot —”
“Juliet!”
She chuckles. “Okay, okay, relax. I’m sorry. Unhelpful, I know. But seriously — is it really so bad that Mercutio’s your true love?”
“Yes!” Tybalt groans, letting his head fall lax against the door of the broom closet with a soft thud. “God, I don’t even know where to start with him. He’s loud, he’s irritating, he never knows when to leave me alone. And he’ll act like everyone’s in love with him and his excuses and his agitating, graveling voice, even when everyone and their mother knows he’s nothing but the dirt on the bottom of your shoe that you can’t get rid of. And he’s always trying to drink, always putting on too much cologne, always too confident with himself. And the way he smiles, you’d think the world is at his knees — he laughs like he’s the only one in the room —”
Then he realizes.
Juliet’s snickering from the other side of the door.
“Fuck.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about him, cuz.” His little cousin muses in a muffled tone from outside, however he could hear and filter out every bit of amusement lacing her voice as if she were right beside him and yelling into his eardrums.
“You are the worst. Possibly my least favorite cousin.”
Juliet snorts. “Yeah, love you too. Okay, look — let’s not fuck around and find out, because we all can tell you’re in love with him. I don’t know why you feel like you have to have this dynamic with him where you hate each other and he flirts with you and you reject all his advances, but I’m going to need you to dig deep into your brain and realize that you don’t hate him. At all. And you need to stop acting like you do and go out there and face your fears or else this will swallow you whole.”
“Juliet —” Tybalt sighs. “I can’t. I can’t like him. I hate him, I despise him, and I always have. Maybe he’s put love potion in my food, or maybe the Amortentia is messing with my head, but he isn’t my true love. It’s not possible.”
“And why can’t it be?” Juliet groans. “You two need to stop dancing around each other knowing you could be something and not being something.”
“We’re not something.”
“If you aren’t something, then talk about him. Right now. Tell me exactly what you think when you think Mercutio Escalus.”
Dark, brown curls falling freely; they frame his face like a portrait locked in a glass case. A loud, boisterous laugh that’s simply so colossal and so incredibly deafening that it makes an imprint in your head and never leaves. No matter how many times Tybalt tells him he needs to be left alone, Mercutio never leaves him alone, and he knows that all of that is just to piss him off — but he likes that Mercutio never leaves. Likes that Mercutio’s funny, loud, confident — he likes the burning smell of alcohol in the dead of morning, mixing with the scent of rich perfume.
He likes it all.
Oh.
Oh no.
“I think I would rather off myself than sustain a conversation with him.” Tybalt says blankly, – hesitantly, almost; after all, it was a complete and utter lie on his part.
He hears a sigh resonate from the other side of the door and he knows it well enough and has heard it enough to know it was the sound of Juliet finally backing down and finally relenting. “You're impossible, Tybalt. Fine. Be that way. But I know you know that you can’t lock your feelings into a broom closet for the rest of your time around him. And I know you know you have to talk to him eventually. But sure, you know, be that way.”
As footsteps sound from the outside world — footsteps walking away — Tybalt’s head falls back again. Leans back. As if it can’t take the weight of his thoughts any longer.
He does know. And it scares him.
But he hopes he’ll never have to face his fears.
That is, until one unexpected day roaming the hallways of Hogwarts.
It’s a weekend. No bullshit classes, bless the weekend’s heart, and most other students were off rotting their teeth away with so-called magical sweets (that were really just disgusting, in Tybalt’s humble opinion. Cockroach clusters?) at Honeydukes and rambling on and on about Zonko’s and joke shops and haunted shacks, whatever any of it meant. Tybalt had been too confused by the whole ordeal of a magical boarding school in the first place to care about what any of the other students’ customs were, and was therefore one of the few people who remained in Hogwarts on weekends.
So he walks. Through and through the hallways, circling the school grounds, hoping to get to know it a tiny bit better considering he’ll have to spend a couple of years learning absolute hooey here.
Paintings and ancient tapestries adorn every corner of every limestone wall, every brick on every arch of each hallway. They depicted what seemed to be wizarding history — old, gray men with graying beards holding grayish-brown wands fighting gray wars over gray mountains and hills. Jets of electric light, shooting out of the ends of each stick of wood, hitting each others’ chests in firework-like explosions. Tybalt doesn’t really care, but it fascinates him anyways; it was real, their history, and it was theirs. They knew it to be true.
He keeps walking. Keeps on staring at tapestries and paintings.
Honestly, it’s calming how little he was thinking of Amortentia and the likes of it. Slughorn who?
“Tybalt.” A voice calls. It’s sharp yet smooth, and fuck, he knows who it is.
So he keeps walking. Pacing through the hallway, running in his head, running from the truth, running from his fears. He’s running, but not in every sense of the word, since in reality he’s briskly walking and trying to be relatively inconspicuous. But Mercutio doesn’t appear to be fooled, since the Capulet hears the footsteps behind him grow louder and louder and closer and closer and goddamn it the guy has big steps and brisk pacing. He can’t run like this. He shouldn’t be running. Juliet was right, he should just face it and own up and get closure.
“Tybalt!” Mercutio calls again. “Tybalt, we need to talk.”
“Fuck you.”
“You’re being real nice, aren’t you? Why don’t you want to talk to me?”
“I know what you want to talk about.”
The Escalus clicks his tongue. “I’m not saying I don’t want to talk about what happened. But, you know, I figured you’d want to talk about something else.”
The Capulet stops in his tracks.
Turns back to face Mercutio.
“Like what?”
The other chuckles and takes a tentative step forward. Tybalt doesn’t really know why, and maybe won’t ever, but he lets him. “Well. Let’s see. You seem to like those paintings a bunch, we could talk about that. The weather — it’s always so cold in England, isn’t it? Huh — butterbeer. Don’t know what they put in that stuff, but it’s a lot better than regular beer, and I wish we had it back at Verona. I don’t think I can get drunk on it, but it’s not half bad taste-wise. Benvolio’s got homework answers, if you need any. The sun. The stars. The moon. Grass.”
Tybalt stares. “Don’t bullshit me. What’s this really about?”
Mercutio sighs with a tiny grin at the corners of his mouth. “Do you want to know what I think I would smell? In my Amortentia?”
“You have no way of knowing. Slughorn’s not letting us brew it until next Potions class.”
“I don’t care.” The Escalus mouths. “I don’t care, because I think I know exactly what I would smell.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Mercutio steps forward, and, really, Tybalt has no idea why on Earth he’s letting him do these things, but in the next second a warm grip is gripping his hand, rifling with the ruby-adorned rings on his fingers, connecting circuitry. Tybalt simultaneously stumbles back and leans into the touch, and it’s a really, really confusing movement since his own body doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. The Escalus’ next words are a whisper. “I’d smell metal. Weaponry.”
The hand moves up to his forearm, where he conceals a dagger. Just to be safe. “Metal?”
Mercutio hums. “Metal. Awful eucalyptus conditioner. The kind that smells like medicinal treatment from Friar Laurence’s drawers. Stings your nose hairs. But the kind you’d like anyways if you were in love with someone.”
How the fuck does he know?
Tybalt is ridden with silence. The Escalus prods on.
“Bergamot. A hint of pepper. Ebony wood. Leather jackets. A freshly washed button up top.”
The notes were dead on, and deadly terrifying because of how endearing it all was. Tybalt breathes in sharply, and that deadly scent of alcohol merging with a wealthy man’s perfume - Mercutio’s perfume – hits him like a broom speeding across a Quidditch field. Mercutio’s deadly close, deadly quiet with a deadly smile, and practically everything was a fatality. If Tybalt had known exactly who he had smelled in that stupid pink potion, he knows even better who Mercutio is referring to. And he knows that he knows that it’s driving him insane.
“Lip gloss.”
And that – well, that was wrong.
“I don’t wear lip gloss.” Tybalt murmurs.
Mercutio’s laugh is an exhale, an echo of a laugh. “So you know it’s you, then?”
The Capulet is begging the lucky stars not to let the smile fighting for its place on his mouth win, because it would so ruin the moment. “You’re a fucking weirdo. It’s hard not to know with how specific you’re being.”
“What?” Mercutio enunciates and slurs simultaneously. Tybalt thinks he might just burst into a ball of fire and hurtle down into the Earth’s core with how incredibly burning the tension between them was. “You were listening to Slughorn, right?The scent of Amortentia, in all its intoxicating glory, is meant to smell exactly like what the drinker finds most attractive about the person they are most attracted to. I think true love’s bullshit, but the potion doesn’t lie.”
Tybalt goes completely silent again. Stares into the eyes of the man he wants to hate so, so badly. Takes in the smell of hidden vodka, the smell of spirits on his clothes. The notes of treasure in the berry-sweet scent of his perfume, in the smell of his conditioner. He drinks the moment in like a man deprived of sustenance without even realizing how heavily he was trying to keep the memory. Remembers Mercutio’s whispers in class, breathing fatally by his earlobes, the air like a love potion setting off a chemical reaction in his bones. Fuck, he hated Mercutio. Hated the fact that he just couldn’t.
He exhales at last. “Lip gloss?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Mercutio’s so close in the next second that his breath fans the Capulet’s face. “Because of this.”
Before Tybalt can protest – and he knows now that he doesn’t really want to – lips collide like lightning in a storm, like the roaring fireplace of a common room.
It’s akin to the jets of light blaring out of the wands of the great wizards in the tapestries, and as his heart and the ice around it melts as if it was shoved into a kiln, he curses Juliet for always knowing exactly what was going on with him. Because he was in love, undeniably, and his hands are tangled into the mess of Mercutio Escalus, and he’s finding himself clinging on for dear life onto the scent of who is apparently both his true love and his worst enemy. He would have thought nothing could beat the vices of Amortentia, but he finds the real thing is far, far more intoxicating. After all, the real thing is exactly what he fell in love with in the first place.
Neither one of them wants to let go.
So the scent of alcohol and a wealthy man’s perfume stays engraved in Tybalt’s mind forever.