Your batch of clairvoyance draught has finished brewing.
~~~
One week went by far more quickly than you'd thought it would. You'd managed a perfect batch of Felix Felicis, and you were just about to find out if your Draughtus Praevisionis had been brewed correctly. An hour before, you'd hidden Juniper's wand within the house the two of you were hiding out in. If your potion had been made properly, she'd immediately know where her wand was without a word from you.
You were hopeful. The book had said your brew needed to be a shimmering, misty lavender color, almost translucent. And the mixture that had been simmering at a near-boil for almost the entire week you'd been in that house had indeed shifted from its original opaque yellow color to exactly the misty lavender you wanted.
"We'll have to take more than what I'm administering you right now if we want to find Harry," you said to Juniper absentmindedly as you got her dosage prepared. "The amount of clairvoyance needed to find a small object is much less than what we'll need to find an entire human. Especially one who's going to be on the move as much as Harry, Ron, and Hermione are."
Juniper nodded as she took the small vial of the clairvoyance draught from your hands. She swirled it around in the small glass flask, watching it shimmer in the light coming through the cracks in the blinds covering the window. "If this is a perfect or even near-perfect batch, you'll be the Head Potioneer at the Apothecary before you even graduate Hogwarts," she said slowly, but you shook your head at the thought. "I'd have to have perfect grades on my NEWTs, too, though," you said, your shoulders slumping in disappointment. And there's no way I'll get those. Not with the classes I had to take this past term, having to take that upper-level Diseases and Treatments of Magical Creatures with Hagrid just to stay hidden as Ravena."
Juniper waved your self-deprecating thoughts off with a flick of her hand. "Snape should be back once the war's over, he'll let you into the upper-level classes immediately. He knows how talented you are, y/n. It would be stupid of anyone to not notice. You're a natural."
You smiled slightly at her kind words, then nudged the vial still sitting in her hand. "Drink it, then. Go find your wand."
She rolled her eyes at you playfully, but she tipped the vial back and swallowed the lilac liquid in one go. You watched as she crinkled her nose, though that was to be expected. The book had said so itself: "Though the liquid will be a pretty color, normally one that reminds one of flowers that pop up as spring is just beginning, one should expect the flavor to be that of a banana that has been left on one's counter for a few days too long. It will not be a pleasant taste, but it will not last very long."
You watched as she sat in silent contemplation for a few seconds, then her eyes lit up. A shimmer of blue light flashed across her corneas, and she stood up and left the room immediately. Your heart began to race in anticipation; this most likely meant your potion had been brewed exactly as it had needed to be.
Juniper entered the room again just a few moments later, drawing her wand from behind her back with a smile as bright as the shining sun outside. You cheered in exhilaration despite yourself, you had never brewed something so complicated without a professor's help. And now you'd brewed one of the even more complicated potions perfectly, all on your own.
"Y/N, what did I tell you?" Juniper cried, pride clear in her bright brown eyes. "You're a natural! You've got the spot at the Apothecary without a fucking doubt!"
You smiled too. You hadn't ever brewed something this good in class. You supposed that with the right motivation and the desire to do well, you really were a natural.
Or, you supposed, perhaps everything you had brewed in class had been that good, and Snape just hadn't been able to bring himself to admit it.
Yeah. That sounded like something you could let yourself believe.
You took a deep breath as you filled up four larger vials then, two for you and Juniper to take now, and two you could pack in your bag in the event you needed to recharge. Your bags were packed, they had been since the night before. You knew that if this potion worked and you didn't need to re-brew it, the two of you would be out on the road, following your own magical subconscious to find the Gryffindor boy you hadn't seen in months.
You handed Juniper a matching vial, and she took it more eagerly this time. "Don't forget, though," she said quickly as you swirled it around in your vial. "It tastes exactly like the book said it would. Old bananas. It's super gross."
You chuckled. "I was hoping for that, really," you said jokingly, with a grin splashed across your face. "Maybe old bananas is my favorite flavor."
The two of you threw your heads back, downing more of the glittering purple potion. You cringed at the taste—you had joked, but it really did taste disgusting.
As you swallowed and the taste disappeared, your head began to feel light and fuzzy, but only for a couple of seconds. Your eyes had gone blurry, like a fog had been put straight in front of your eyes, but it began to clear up after just a few seconds as well. As you shook your head to clear it further, you began to be able to practically see the trio you were looking for in your head—well, you saw Harry and Hermione, anyway. You weren't sure where Ron was.
Ron's absence wasn't really of any significance to you, though. You really hadn't been friends with him or Hermione. You'd barely been friends with Harry.
"Can you see them in your head, too?" Juniper asked as you looked over at her. Her eyes were wide with wonder as she looked around the room, letting the effects of the potion fully take over.
"Yeah," you breathed. "It's working."
Juniper looked back at you again then, nodding once in a firm acknowledgement of what now lay before you.
"Let's get going then," she said decidedly.
"Let's go find that Gryffindor!"
~~~
The first few hours of your trek were done mostly in silence. Both of you were following the trail your mind's opened third eye was showing you, and you weren't even sure where you were anymore. You weren't sure if you could even find your way back to the house you'd started out in if it were to suddenly wear off.
"I wonder why we can't see Ron?" Juniper wondered aloud as you made your way through a thickly wooded forest. You shrugged. Her guess was as good as yours. "Maybe the potion only works for two people?" you responded.
"Or maybe Ron's dead," Juniper said somberly. You shook your head at that remark. "We would've heard by now if Ron Weasley was dead," you pointed out. "Even if he was technically 'missing'. His mum would've known immediately."
Juniper laughed. "That's true," she admitted. "After that Howler she sent second year, there's no way Ron would be able to die without her knowing. And if she knew he was dead, the whole world would know within a week."
You chuckled in response. You'd seen Molly Weasley on Platform 9¾ more than once. She seemed like an incredibly sweet woman, but you also knew she somehow knew everything about her children, no matter how old or how far away they were. If Ron were dead, you would've heard about it.
"Why'd they even set out on their own?" Juniper asked then, nearly tripping over an exposed root on the forest floor. "I get them needing to hide from You-Know-Who and all, but why're they still running? You'd think they would've just found a cave and camped out there, or something."
You didn't know the answer to that either, and you told Juniper so. "I have no clue why they're continuously on the move, but it does make some sense. If you stay in one spot, it's a lot easier for you to be found. Even if they were in some far-off cave that nobody had ever even found before, they still would've just been sitting ducks for the most part."
"Maybe they were sitting ducks, and Ron just went bat-shit crazy and took off," Juniper said with a chuckle.
"You've got quite the imagination over there," you said with a grin as the two of you walked on.
"Thanks, it's my best feature," she responded playfully.
Silence fell back over the both of you as you pushed your way through the wooded area. The blue light surrounding the image of Harry and Hermione was growing slightly brighter, and you knew that meant you were on the right path.
But all too soon, darkness fell, and you were forced to stop walking and set up camp for the night. Luckily, since you'd been on a trip very similar to this with Draco a few months prior, so it didn't take you very long to get the tent set up – or to get the cots inside the tent put together, either.
Juniper groaned in relief as she collapsed onto one of the cots once she was in the tent. "I didn't realize how tired my feet were until I stopped using them," she said breathily. "We must've walked a hundred miles today."
"I don't think so," you said with a chuckle as you pulled the same healing potion Draco had once used on you out of your bag. "We were only walking for six hours—we would've had to have gone like ten, fifteen miles in an hour for that to work. And I don't think humans can walk that fast."
"Can't we just apparate?" Juniper whined then, sitting up as you poured a couple drops of the potion onto her aching feet. But you shook your head. "No," you said firmly, although watching her shoulders sag did make you feel rather bad. "Our attention would be too split between what the clairvoyance potion is doing to our heads and actually apparating—the risk of splinching would be way too high."
Juniper huffed as she flopped back down onto her cot. "Blech," she groaned again. "This is gonna take forever."
You rolled your eyes, semi-playfully. "The light's already growing brighter, June," you reminded her as you pulled a couple blankets out of the bag. "It shouldn't take longer than a couple more days for us to find them."
"Yeah, but what then?" she asked, scrubbing at her eyes. "Are they even gonna let us join them?"
"I feel like they'll have to," you responded, but you weren't sure whether that was the truth. "I'm supposed to be dead. But I hope Harry still trusts me, even though the last real conversation we had was me rejecting him after he found out I'd lied about breaking up with Draco."
"Speaking of Draco," Juniper said then, sitting up more fully. "Do you have any idea where he is?"
You shook your head, willing your eyes not to fill up with tears. "I have no clue," you answered honestly. "I can only hope I'll see him alive again someday."
Juniper's eyes filled with sadness at your statement. "I'm sorry, y/n," she said, the tone in her voice a clear attempt to be reassuring. "I shouldn't have brought it up."
You sighed. "It was a basic question, I can't exactly blame you for asking," you responded as you crawled up onto your own cot, handing Juniper one of the two blankets you'd dug out of your backpack.
"You'll see him again, y/n," Juniper whispered into the night as you extinguished your wand light and laid down on the barely comfortable cot.
"I'll make sure of it."