Friends Kiss Too | F. Weasley

Chapter 52 - A Knack for Healing

The rest of February had been as cold as ever, but most of the snow was gone and instead replaced with periods of freezing rain around the house. The skies were as grey as ever and Milena was still stuck at the house, watching as the weather continued to downpour.

She still hadn't given up on the potions yet, working on them to keep herself distracted. She had even now moved Muriel's little radio into the kitchen and would always try to catch Potterwatch as she worked and though sometimes she did miss it because she couldn't find the correct channel, she did manage to find it occasionally. Each time she would listen in, she would pay close attention to everything, hoping that the list of people found dead was minimal - it never was.

She hadn't heard a name she recognized in a while, but everyday it seemed like more and more muggles and muggle borns were turning up dead with the dark mark looming over their homes. Sometimes it was hard to listen to Potterwatch.

"Oh would you turn that off?" Muriel groaned as she shuffled into the kitchen. "That stuff is no good to be listening to."

Milena frowned at Muriel as she turned her back and began restlessly tidying the kitchen. She rolled her eyes and turned back to the radio, they were wrapping up anyways so she waited just long enough to hear the password for next week's show and shut it off.

"How much longer will you be with all of this?" Muriel asked, gesturing to Milena's experimental potions and supplies everywhere. "I need to get things ready for dinner soon."

"I'm pretty much done." Milena said flatly. "Let me just bottle this and I'll clean up."

"Don't take too long, Godric knows I already let you use my kitchen too much." Muriel demanded as she began pushing some things aside.

Milena gave the potion she was working on one more stir clockwise and waited a moment. All she needed was for the potion to turn a dark purple, almost like a cauldron full of grape juice. The potion was a deep shade of blue, something like a midnight sky, then as she finished the last stir, it faded into a dark purple.

"Yes!" She cheered, startling Muriel. "Oh... sorry."

Muriel just tutted at her and continued to tidy up the counters. Milena grabbed her vials and bottled up as much of the potion as she could, then vanished the remnants left at the bottom of the cauldron. She took a minute to label each of the bottles as "Potion Test #14 - Skele-Gro Improved" then stored them away and cleaned up the rest of her supplies.

Muriel finally shooed her out of the kitchen as she finished and Milena left in a hurry, trying to avoid being given anymore chores. She left for her room with her vials and wrote down the last of her notes on them in her notebook she would have normally left in the kitchen. The only issue she had now was testing it. She wasn't exactly partial to the idea of vanishing her own bones or breaking them to see if her potion worked and she also didn't love the idea of getting someone else to try it for her. So, she stored them away in a drawer and left them for now.

Every other test she had done so far had basically gone flat, turning most of her potions into nothing more than tasteless drinks - if you could even call them drinks. One of them had just turned into an acidic liquid with a weird yellow colour that left burn marks along the inside of the cauldron, she still wasn't entirely sure how she had done that.

By the time dinner was ready that night, everyone had come home from another meeting. Fred and George had helped Lee with Potterwatch again and both seemed less cheery than before each time they did it. Milena supposed that reading that much horrible news all the time would do that.

At dinner, Milena sat across from Fred. Everyone at the table seemed pretty quiet as Muriel went on and on, complaining about whatever she could come up with. She didn't seem to notice that not a single person was paying attention as she babbled on.