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Julian Albert may be in love with his Potions partner.
This crosses his mind a few weeks into their partnership as they’re smelling the fumes coming from their brewed Amortentia. He’s been smelling the fumes for the last 20 minutes or so as other groups have finished their own potions, way too early for them to have brewed it properly but that has nothing to do with him, but as they finish their own and he stands in front of the cauldron on their table with the smell a million times stronger than he thought it would be, his life flashes before his eyes because of course, he would be dumb enough to fall in love with Barry Allen.
The potion smells like vanilla mixed in with the coffee he hated but always magically had a cup of because the West girl from Gryffindor had apparently started working at a coffee shop during the last holidays. There’s something else too that smells sharp and the closest word he can come to is electric but he knows that’s not exactly it, he also knows this is going to bother him for the rest of the week because why can Barry not just smell like freshly mown grass or something less obscure.
He only realises he’s been staring at the potion for longer than he’d thought when Barry’s suddenly right next to him and waving a hand in front of his face, his immediate reaction is to slap the hand away which he regrets as soon as a look of hurt flashed over Barry’s face, he knows he should stop being prickly towards the American boy as he’s been told a million times by his Ravenclaw housemates since the beginning of their 6th year but here they are once again.
“Sorry,”, he grits out as Barry starts backing off, “I was just a little distracted.”
“It’s understandable considering you’re smelling what the person you’re going to end up with smells like, but you still haven’t told me what you can smell.”, Barry says, a smile back on his face as he carries on clearing their table.
Oh, oh yeah, Barry wants to know what he can smell. He is not freaking out, he’s just trying to frantically sort through his options, tell the truth or lie, and neither of these options is appealing to him at the moment.
So he does what he does best in moments of panic, mediocre deflection is apparently a skill of his. “Why should I even tell you mine when I don’t know yours?”.
How far he’s fallen, he misses the good old days when he had a snarky comment for everything, now he’s been reduced to playground retorts, and not even the good ones.
The laugh coming from Barry Allen just solidifies his disappointments as he feels his ears going red, the Hufflepuff has no right to laugh at him when he’s put Julian in such an awkward situation.
“You never asked me for mine,”, Barry gasps out as Julian considers moving far, far away to somewhere where this boy will never find him.
Of course, he can’t even think this without feeling a little pang in his heart as he considers not seeing the Hufflepuff ever again and to say he hates himself for it is possibly the understatement of the century.
Through his growing self-hatred, he hears Barry say the word ‘you’. Julian isn’t sure what exactly Barry is talking about so he glances over at him to see him fiddling with the pestle and mortar.
“What?”, he asks after a few seconds of silence when he realises that Barry is determined to keep examining the tools in his hands as if they have some unknown meaning.
“My potion smells like you.”, the words are barely above a mumble and directed to the pestle, which is now floating above their table in slow circles, but Julian hears them loud and clear. In fact, it’s the last thing he hears for a while.
~
The first thing he sees is the huge vase of flowers on top of his side table, they’re so bright that they almost feel like they’re filling up the entire room. It takes him a few seconds to realise that what he’s seeing are sunflowers.
The first thing he feels is a hand holding onto his, still a bit sluggish he looks down and sees a sleeping Barry and everything that happened comes back to him instantly and with it comes the embarrassment he feels colouring his cheeks red. He considers kicking Barry awake but decides that he looks too pretty when he’s sleeping so he stares up at the ceiling until his skin returns to normal and he can think of what happened without wanting to punch himself in the face.
Madame Pomfrey bustles in not long after and fusses over him, waking Barry up in the process and it’s all he can do to not kiss Barry’s sleepy face as he blinks the sleep from his eyes and yawns lazily.
Pomfrey shoots Barry a dirty look, which goes unnoticed by the barely awake boy, but clears Julian quite quickly telling him that he most likely fainted because of the lack of ‘adequate airing down in the dungeons’. She warns him to not bring his boyfriend back as she does her final checks before letting him leave. Barry, who is still half asleep, shoots an indignant look at her but she rushes them out of the room and levitates the huge sunflowers after them letting Barry take them.
As soon as the door is closed, Barry hands the flowers to Julian murmuring something about them being for him and Julian takes them hesitantly trying to understand how he got to this point in his life.
Barry breaks the silence that has settled around them, “They’re sunflowers, they’re supposed to mean hope and adoration. Well partially, they also have some spiritual significance but I don’t think that applies in this case but definitely, the hope and adoration part because I really hope you didn’t smell someone else in the dungeons cause this is going to be really awkward if you did but i ju-”,
Julian decides that Barry has been babbling on for long enough and suddenly Julian is kissing Barry, Julian is on his toes because the idiot had to be taller than him and his hand is gripping at the yellow and black tie to pull him down a little to make this a little less difficult. Barry takes a few seconds to realise that kisses require effort from both people so Julian starts pulling away but Barry follows him and suddenly they’re kissing and why had they not done this before?
Julian starts to forget himself and melt into Barry until suddenly there’s glass crashing on the floor and water splashing onto their feet and giggles as they pull apart to stare at the mess they’ve made.