The Potion Trapped Me With My Star Student and My Sworn Enemy

One moment, the Headmaster’s office was a familiar cage of spinning silver instruments and Dumbledore’s lingering ghost. The next, it was a vortex of violent green light and screaming pressure. The cursed locket we’d been attempting to neutralize didn’t just resist the potion; it devoured it, spat it back, and the world fractured. There was a sickening, gut-wrenching pull behind my navel, a brutal side-along Apparition I hadn’t consented to, and then a bone-jarring impact against cold stone.

I landed on my hands and knees, the air knocked from my lungs. The sharp scent of ozone and ancient dust filled my nostrils. For a full ten seconds, the only sound was Potter’s groan somewhere to my left and Granger’s sharp, gasping breaths to my right.

Of all the infernal, damnable luck.

I pushed myself to my feet, my long-suffering robes catching on the rough-hewn floor. My wand was still in my hand, a small mercy. A quick, nonverbal spell sent a globe of cool white light to the ceiling, illuminating our prison. We were in a circular chamber, its walls seamless, constructed from a dark, unsettling stone that seemed to drink the light. There were no doors. No windows. Just the three of us, trapped.

My fury was a physical thing, a hot spike behind my ribs. To be stuck anywhere with Potter was a trial. His very existence was a monument to my failures, a constant, walking reminder of Lily. But to be trapped with both of them—Potter and his insufferable, swotty handmaiden—was a circle of hell I had never thought to contemplate.

“What happened?” Potter scrambled up, his glasses askew, his wand out and pointing at nothing. He looked like a startled foal, all gangly limbs and wide, useless eyes.

“The locket created a dimensional rift, Potter,” I sneered, my voice colder than the stone beneath my feet. “A fact you might have anticipated if you’d spent less time staring at your own reflection in the potion’s sheen and more time reading the preparatory notes.”

Before he could offer a witless retort, Granger was already moving. She ignored us both, her focus absolute. She walked the perimeter of the room, her small hands ghosting over the stone, her brow furrowed in that annoyingly familiar expression of intense concentration. Her lips moved, whispering words I couldn’t quite catch. She wasn’t panicking. She was assessing. Analyzing.

“The entire chamber is a ward,” she finally announced, her voice steady despite the situation. “Interlocking, ancient. I’ve never seen anything like it outside of a text. It’s not just keeping us in; it’s masking our magical signatures. No one will know we’re gone. They’ll just think we vanished.”

Potter looked at her, his dependence on her absolute and pathetic. He was the Chosen One, yet without her brain, he was just a boy with a scar. A bitter, undeniable thought surfaced through my rage. My own mastery of the Dark Arts was extensive, but this was something else. This was primordial, foundational magic. The kind Granger, damn her, had probably committed to memory from some obscure tome in the restricted section.

My fury did not abate, but a cold layer of pragmatism settled over it. I was trapped. Trapped with the Boy Who Lived and the girl who ensured he continued to do so. And as much as I loathed to admit it, my survival, for the moment, was entirely dependent on the encyclopedic knowledge stored inside Hermione Granger’s head.

“We search,” I commanded, my voice cutting through the heavy silence. “Every stone. Every shadow. There is a power source to this ward, and we will find it.”

Potter, for once, didn’t argue. He simply nodded, his expression grim, and began to move along the opposite curve of the wall. Granger, however, turned her attention from the seamless stone to the objects arranged in shallow alcoves that ringed the room. They were easy to miss, half-swallowed by the oppressive darkness of the chamber. I followed her gaze. There were dozens of them: a twisted silver chalice that seemed to ripple in the light, a set of bone-white chimes that remained stubbornly silent, a leather-bound book with a clasp in the shape of a serpent eating its own tail.

As I drew closer, I could feel it—a low thrum in the air, a vibration that resonated not in the ears but in the bones. It was the hum of latent magic, yes, but it was saturated with something else. Emotion. Decades, perhaps centuries, of raw, unfiltered feeling, soaked into these forgotten things. I could taste the faint echo of despair from the chalice, a whisper of maddening obsession from the book. My years of Occlumency had made me acutely sensitive to such psychic residue, and this room was thick with it.

Granger seemed to feel it too. She stopped before a large, rectangular slab of polished obsidian set into the wall like a darkened window. It was a mirror that reflected nothing, a void that seemed to pull at the light and warmth of the room. It emanated the strongest feelings of all: a cold, predatory hunger and a profound, bottomless loneliness. It was a vile object.

She took a half-step toward it, her academic curiosity overriding her caution. Her hand began to lift, her fingers ready to trace its edge.

“Granger, don’t,” Potter’s voice was sharp.

Before the words were even fully out of his mouth, he was moving. He crossed the space between them in two long strides and planted himself directly in front of her, his body a physical barrier between her and the obsidian mirror. He didn’t touch her, didn’t look at her. He just stood there, his back to her, facing the dark glass as if it were a basilisk. A shield.

A familiar, acidic bile rose in my throat. It was the same instinctive, thoughtless arrogance I had witnessed a hundred times in his father. James Potter, stepping in front of Lily, puffing out his chest in some moronic display of Gryffindor bravado. The gesture was identical—the same unthinking heroism, the same possessive claim. The irritation was so sharp, so bitter, it was almost a comfort in its familiarity. But then, as I watched Potter’s shoulders tense, as I saw Granger’s small, almost imperceptible frown from behind him, a new and unwelcome thread wove into the old bitterness. It wasn’t just Potter’s posturing that galled me. It was that he was shielding her. And a dark, ugly part of my soul, a part I had not known existed until that very moment, bristled at the sight of it.

“It’s just a Scrying Mirror, Potter. A particularly nasty one,” Granger’s voice was clipped, pulling away from him and the obsidian slab. She shot me a look, one that acknowledged my expertise in such dark objects without needing to say a word. She moved on, her focus shifting to the book with the serpent clasp. “The answer won’t be in the artifacts themselves, but in their containment.”

She pried at the clasp. It wouldn't yield. Without a word, I stepped forward, my long fingers tracing the interlocking scales of the Ouroboros. A simple sequence-release charm, one taught to first-year Slytherins to protect their diaries. I tapped the serpent's eye, its tail, then its fanged mouth. The clasp hissed open with a puff of stale, dry air.

Granger didn't thank me. She didn't need to. She simply took the book, laid it on a flat-topped stone pedestal near the center of the room, and began to turn the brittle, yellowed pages. Potter hovered uselessly behind her, a guard dog with no one to bite. I stood opposite, my arms crossed, forced into this tableau of unwilling cooperation.

For what felt like an hour, the only sound was the dry crackle of parchment. Finally, she stopped. “Here.”

I moved to her side, forced to lean in close to see the cramped, spidery script and the complex arcane diagrams that filled the page. The air suddenly felt thick, heavy with her proximity.

“It’s a Chrono-stasis Ward, keyed to emotional resonance,” she murmured, her finger tracing a line of text. Her nail was bitten short, a small imperfection that was jarringly human. “It feeds on ambient feeling to sustain itself. The only way to break it is to overload it. It requires a three-stage counter-spell. A potion, a runic array, and a direct magical infusion.” She looked up, her brown eyes meeting mine over the book. They were serious, devoid of her usual classroom eagerness. Here, she was not a student, but a peer. “It will take hours. At least twelve.”

Twelve hours. Trapped in this emotionally charged pressure cooker with these two. A fresh wave of despair washed over me.

“The potion is the first step. The ingredients are… esoteric.” Her finger moved to a list on the right-hand page, and I leaned closer, my gaze following hers. We were shoulder to shoulder, our heads bent over the ancient text. I could feel the heat radiating from her body, a stark contrast to the chill of the dungeon. The space between us was nonexistent.

As she shifted her weight to point out a particularly difficult passage on sympathetic alchemy, the worn wool of her sleeve slid against the back of my hand.

The contact was nothing. A whisper of fabric against skin. But a jolt, sharp and electric, shot up my arm. It was not magical. It was something far more primal, something my body registered before my mind could erect a single defense. With the touch came her scent, not just the dust of the grimoire, but something underneath. Vanilla. Faint, warm, and sweet. And the smell of old parchment, a scent I’d always associated with the library, with solitude, with peace. On her, it was… intoxicating.

I recoiled as if I’d touched a red-hot poker. I physically jerked back, putting a full pace of stone between us. My heart hammered against my ribs, a wild, panicked beat. My hand tingled, burned.

Granger looked up, startled, her brow furrowing in confusion. Potter’s head snapped in my direction, his hand instantly going to the wand in his pocket.

My reaction was absurd. Utterly, ridiculously disproportionate. It was the sleeve of a robe. A scent. Nothing. Yet my body had betrayed me with a violence that left me breathless. I stared at my own hand as if it belonged to a stranger, clenching it into a fist to stop the phantom sensation of that soft wool, that impossible warmth. It was the room, I told myself. The oppressive magic, the emotional residue. It had to be. Because the alternative—that the simple, accidental touch of Hermione Granger could unravel me so completely—was a truth far more terrifying than any ward.