Pulling Strings - Theodore Nott

7. Dangerous thoughts

Slughorn chose right that moment to enter the classroom and every student was forced to keep quiet and pay attention. Everyone but Ophelia. She stayed in the same position, looking at Nott with an open-mouth expression until the flick of his wand—finishing the spell, she presumed— brought her back to reality.

She tried to force her attention back to the figure of Slughorn in front of the class but without much success. Her mind was just spiralling with problems. If this was true and Nott expected her to...do that, she was in some serious shit. It was one thing to lie to Snape—even though he hadn't believed one word of it, but steal from him? That was something seriously dangerous. You had to be really bold and stupid to attempt something like that.

Perhaps she could get a Gryffindor to do it.

She covered her mouth to avoid laughing at the bad joke she'd made and that's when she noticed that Slughorn had started speaking, and not only that, he was pointing towards his desk, where three cauldrons had appeared out of nowhere. "...These are the kind of things you ought to be able to make after completing your N.E.W.T.s. You ought to have heard of them, even if you haven't made them yet." he pointed to the first cauldron, the one sitting almost in a straight line from where Ophelia was sitting. "Anyone tell me what this one is?"

She ventured a look at it, lifting herself from her chair just slightly, she noticed that the first one looked like plain water boiling, nothing special really. It didn't have any smell and unless the professor was playing a prank on them by bringing actual water instead of a potion, she had a pretty good idea of what it was.

"That's Veritaserum." she whispered to herself, hoping that nobody had heard her. It was bad enough that she had missed the introduction that Professor Slughorn did, she didn't want to embarrass herself by getting the answer wrong.

It was, to no one's surprise, Hermione Granger who raised her hand and got the answer right. "Very good, very good!" said Slughorn happily. "Now," he continued, pointing at the cauldron nearest the Ravenclaw table. This one was a clear contrast to the one before, it was dense and had slow bubbles that popped making a thick sound. "this one here is pretty well known... Featured in a few Ministry leaflets lately too..." She noticed the dark, mud-like colour of the potion and when put together with the information that Slughorn was saying, she could think of only one potion that checked all the boxes. " Who can—?"

"Polyjuice Potion?" she answered, half in doubt, at the same time that Granger shouted, "It's Polyjuice Potion, sir." Once again, the answer was right. Ophelia didn't care that Granger had beat her to it, after all she wasn't very eager to speak in class. She much preferred the practical exams when she could actually prove that she knew how to make said potions. Anyone could read things in a book and memorise them, but not everyone had the talent to create them.

Slughorn for his part, looked thrilled, unlike the rest of her classmates who looked already bored. That's when he pointed to the last cauldron left on his desk, this was a bit far from where she was sitting so she had to stand up slightly to get a closer look and when she did, she didn't even need Slughorn to ask the question. It was a pearlescent liquid, no bubbles this time and the steam from it could be seen rising in quite a few spirals. She would even bet that if she were closer, she could smell the characteristics of what attracts her most—no matter that she didn't know what it was. The potion somehow always knew.

She smiled to herself, sitting back on her stool. "And that's...Amortentia." She didn't try this time to raise her voice either. It became clear seconds later that Granger once again knew the answer to it. It was when she was pretending to listen to the girl explain what she already knew that she felt movement by her left side and before she could turn to see what it was, Nott's face was next to hers, just millimetres away.