i'll always be on your team [sienna]

[Deleted]

february 10, 2025

Jamie had a sheaf of parchment clutched tight against her chest. It didn't look like it was going to snow anytime soon, but she didn't want to take any chances - the information she was holding onto was precious. She had just been at St. Mungo's, interviewing one of the people who worked in their Wolfsbane dispensary. She had managed to procure a list of ingredients for the potion, and even better, step-by-step instructions on how Mungo's personally made their stock. It was exactly what she and Sienna needed to continue their research on improving the Wolfsbane Potion. They had socked around a few ideas, but now they had the list they'd be able to see if their previous theories would hold any water, and have fodder for even more research. Needless to say, Jamie was excited.

"Guess what I have!" She practically shouted when she got through the door of the apothecary and to the workroom she shared with Sienna. Jamie waved the pages excitedly for a moment, then stopped - she didn't want to crinkle the parchment the information was on too much, not until they had copied it down at least once. Jamie set the papers down on Siena's worktable for her coworker to peruse, beaming. "Oh - and good morning," Jamie added, a little belatedly. It was easy to forget social niceties when you were focused on sharing good news!

Sienna Aurélie Linslee

[Sienna Aurélie Linslee]

It started like any normal day. The last scheduled shipment of sopophorous beans had never arrived, so Si had lodged a complaint and received the second shipment free. Now, however…her workspace was cluttered with a dozen unopened packages of sopophorous beans and Si sitting, defeated, in the middle of the chaos.

She was saved by Jamie’s explosive entrance to the backroom, which no longer shocked Sienna. It did surprise her how much energy her coworker always seemed to have, since Si considered herself a fairly active person – although Jamie operated on a different level completely. “Hmmm, Gilderoy Lockhart’s autograph?” Si guessed, giving Jamie a cheeky grin before leaning over a few boxes to examine the parchment. She followed up with a “good morning. Did you slip an Invigoration Draught into your coffee?”

Sienna partially skimmed through what looked to be an ingredients list before she practically jumped off her seat. “You got it!” she gasped, before allowing a squeal of joy to escape her. There was little the girls could do to work on the Wolfsbane Potion without brewing instructions, so Si had instead been reading on werewolves – their history, their physiology, England’s community. But her real strengths were on the potioneering side and she felt rather restless waiting to become useful.

It felt like an important moment, the official moment they could begin their partnership, so she reached over the table to give Jamie a quick hug. “We have to give brewing it a go!”

@jamie

[Deleted]

Jamie wrinkled her nose when Sienna suggested she might have Gilderoy Lockhart’s autograph. Whether her coworker meant the elder Lockhart or the junior, the image was equally distasteful. Not that Jamie had a thing against autographs – she was going to collect all of the Harpies’ autographs if it killed her – but she definitely had a thing against Lockharts. Not a big thing, but a thing. Enough of a thing that having one of their autographs would have been weird.

“I don’t drink coffee,” Jamie said with a roll of her eyes. “I’m high on life.” More specifically, she was ecstatic about actually having something to work on for their joint project. “Wouldn’t you know if I had taken an Invigoration Drought?” Jamie added as an afterthought. There had to be a difference between potion-borne invigoration and emotion-borne. Maybe she ought to start keeping notebooks like Sienna did, to jot down all of her various random thoughts about potions – or whatever else came to mind. Jamie’s brain sometimes moved faster than she did, so it would be worth a shot.

Getting hugged by Sienna wasn’t something Jamie expected, given how reserved her coworker could sometimes be, but Jamie managed to return the hug quickly before Sienna let go. “Obviously we do!” Jamie took a look at Sienna’s station, frowning. “Unless you’ve started a project that involves an unholy amount of beans?” She didn’t know why there were so many sopophorous beans on Sienna’s station, but it was worth the ask. They both were still employed by the apothecary, after all, and they had work to do.

Sienna Aurélie Linslee

[Sienna Aurélie Linslee]

Sienna quickly shifted several boxes of sopophorous beans onto her chair so she could locate and examine her ever-growing stack of notes on Wolfsbane. It also allowed her to turn her back and hide a snort – Jamie was getting very good at coaxing laughs out of her and Si had to wonder if it was because she was becoming predictable or if Jamie was just funny. “Oh, so we’re calling it ‘life’ now,” Sienna responded as she turned back around.

Jamie’s question made her smile – she’d been here for some time now and was quickly learning how to ask the right sorts of questions. “Not necessarily,” Si shrugged as she maintained her grin, “it can be hard to tell the difference between the effects of spells, potions, and stupidity. My sixth year, a dozen students nearly missed their O.W.L.s because they’d been taking massive doses of Wideye Potion. It took days for anyone to realize something was wrong.” Si had finally started to loosen up at work, and…it didn’t feel so uncomfortable to share small tidbits about her life.

Now that Jamie had brought the ingredients list, Sienna was filled with anticipation at the prospect of finally getting some potioneering done. Still, Jamie’s question made her huff. “It’s these blasted suppliers! The first shipment never came, so I ordered a second, and now everything’s here at once. There’s no potion on this earth that is worth the trouble of these beans.” Her chair was now full, so Si leaned on the table instead. “But that’s boring. Tell me about your visit to St. Mungo’s.”

@jamie

[Deleted]

Jamie snorted when Sienna made a comment doubting her energy being due to life only. She had liked her coworker before, but it was nice to see her begin to open up a little. Jamie didn’t doubt that the pair having a shared project made that easier. Sienna went on to display her new openness by telling a story from her years in school. Jamie raised her eyebrows. “How on earth did they get that much potion? Owls?” It seemed like a waste of money to ship so much Wideye Potion to school when the students could’ve just started studying earlier, but maybe that was Jamie’s people-pleasing side talking. “That’s wild.” And also nixed her idea of creating a guidebook for how to tell when someone was under a potion’s effects.

“If people stopped ordering sleep potions we could stop ordering the beans, but that doesn’t seem likely.” Insomnia wasn’t getting any better across generations. If anything, Jamie thought it was getting worse – so endless sopophorous beans it was.

“Mungo’s was good!” Jamie enthused. “I mean, I just say my name and people have a pretty good idea of what I’m there for, so it was nice to be able to do something that wasn’t just going to the clinic. And the Healer was very helpful – she didn’t want people to get the idea Wolfsbane was a proprietary thing, but since it’s such an expensive and complicated potion she understood why most books don’t have a recipe.” Jamie paused so she could catch her breath. “She asked why I wanted it, so I had to lie a little. Don’t want someone else beating us to the punch.” While a part of Jamie knew having more people on the problem might result in more advances more quickly, she also wanted to be the one to make the breakthrough. Secrecy was a double-edged sword.

Sienna Aurélie Linslee

[Sienna Aurélie Linslee]

Remembering the Wideye Incident that had occurred just before taking the exams led Si to roll her eyes a little at the entire fiasco. She’d been approached by one of the students beforehand, first to ask for brewing assistance and then to actually offer her an ‘in.’ The whole thing had been incredibly poorly-designed. “Oh, I’m sure there were massive covert brews and trades happening in the bathrooms,” Sienna drawled. “No part of that plan was thought out carefully.”

Sienna nodded along thoughtfully with Jamie’s recounting of her visit to the clinic. She’d always greatly admired the work that Healers did, and she honestly might have considered it as a potential career if she’d been more of the…caring type. At any rate, if she and Jamie could truly accomplish what they hoped to do with the Wolfsbane Potion, it’d make a lot of lives easier – including those of the Healers who could only do so much to help.

That train of thought, along with Jamie’s last few comments, lit a lightbulb in Si’s head as she remembered a note she’d taken at the beginning of the month. “That reminds me…” Si began, tapping her fingers against the table before turning to shift through her notes. “I was in Horizon Alley the other day and I passed by…oh, what’s it called?” Sienna trailed off as she flicked through pieces of parchment (and besides, it’s not like Jamie needed to know that Si made regular trips to forget her sorrows in the sweets shop with her friends). “Yes, here! Cl-claustrum de lupus? I didn’t really have the courage to go in alone, but…it occurred to me that it’ll be very difficult to experiment with the potion alone. There’ll be multiple variations, which requires trial and error, which requires willing subjects…not to mention feedback from the community.”

Si shrugged as she handed Jamie a few bits of her notes to look over. “Might be worth a visit once we get further along in the process. Maybe after we patent it,” she added at the end with a laugh.

@jamie

[Deleted]

Jamie shook her head again when Sienna said there were probably covert brewing operations happening in the bathrooms. When she was in school there was no way she would’ve gotten involved in something like that, even if she was talented at Potions. Then again, when she had been in school, sneaking off to the bathroom at regular intervals was a poor idea and a great way to get yourself marked as suspicious.

Sienna mentioned the place in Horizon that was meant to give werewolves a safe haven – Claustrum de Lupus. Jamie swallowed, suddenly nervous. She’d never actually been to the place, despite having passed it several times – and being their target audience, unlike Sienna. “We can go together sometime?” Sienna had said she wasn’t comfortable going alone, and honestly, neither was Jamie. For all she knew, some of the werewolves in the Claustrum had, like her, been turned by her father. Either way, Greyback wasn’t exactly a popular name in the werewolf community, given how bad of publicity he gave the entire group of them. Maybe she could go by her mother’s name when she was there…

“I also have some… associates?” Jamie blanched at the word, but it was the best accurate one. She had a friend who was a werewolf, and siblings too – but she wasn’t going to out them to Sienna, if they didn’t want that information to be made public. “I can ask around and see if they’d be interested.” Adrian probably couldn’t, since he was at school and they’d want to be sure he was safe to be around, but maybe Flora would be willing to give a new potion variation a try. “I can be a test subject as well, of course. Unless you think that would be a conflict of interest?” They had already established Jamie’s own lycanthropy status, and of course Jamie wanted to try their potion. But if it would somehow cause it to be more difficult for them to patent the potion, she didn’t want to risk it.

Sienna Aurélie Linslee

[Sienna Aurélie Linslee]

There was a noticeable shift in the tone of the conversation after Sienna mentioned Claustrum de Lupus. Jamie looked nervous, uncomfortable even, and Si almost regretted bringing it up. She was comfortable with the potioneering side of their endeavor, of puzzling out the secrets of the Wolfsbane Potion to figure out what was wrong and how to make it better. It required precision and patience, and those were two attributes that Si had in abundance. But the community aspect of the potion made her more uncomfortable. That it would need to be tested, that long discussions with the werewolf community would be required…Sienna didn’t understand how the werewolf community worked and that made everything ten times more difficult.

But these were the types of conversations that needed to be discussed, and Si nodded in relief when Jamie suggested going in together. “I don’t think it can be avoided,” Si responded, biting her lip. She wanted to cheer up at Jamie’s mention of ‘associates,’ but the other girl was still very serious and didn’t look particularly thrilled. Sienna absorbed everything that Jamie recounted for her and considered her question in silence for a beat before answering. “It occurred to me too, that you’d probably have to be the first test subject. But…” Sienna winced slightly and fiddled with a piece of her hair before continuing. Her concerns were a little different from Jamie’s. “It’s going to take time to get it right, and the first few times probably won’t work. I’m worried about your transformation period being…painful before our potion can do its job.”

It was true that they’d only been coworkers for a few months, and partners for even less, but Si was starting to get protective of Jamie. They saw each other nearly every day, and thus far Sienna liked what she saw. She wasn’t particularly well-versed in what the transformation did to the werewolf, but she knew how long it took to fiddle with a potion to get things right. “It’d be great if you could ask around. And I’d like to follow the brewing procedure at least for the first month to get a feel for the potion. You can tell a lot about what its creator intended for the potion based on how they got to the final product. We could even start now, if you’d like.”

Sienna had never invented an original potion, per se, but she had freelanced for a year and gone through many phases of testing new twists on old potions. That had been what first ignited her interest in octopus powder. She was confident that it wouldn’t take long at least to identify each ingredient’s role in Wolfsbane, although it’d be much more complicated to discover the fix.

@jamie

[Deleted]

Sienna said that going into Claustrum de Lupus probably couldn’t be avoided, which was true. If they wanted to make significant progress they couldn’t just have one test subject every month; they needed to be able to test out multiple variations and see which one worked the best. At least Sienna had been on the same page about Jamie potentially (probably) being their first test subject. She was sweet to worry about Jamie and the transformation being painful, but… “I’ve been in pain before, and I will be again. At least this pain will mean something.” There were times in her life when she had hurt for no reason except for the world being cruel and sometimes unfair. It was different to actively choose something painful, for the betterment of others. If there was one thing Jamie knew about herself it was that she would walk through fire again and again if she could spare someone else from the flames.

“I’ll ask as many people as I can,” Jamie promised. It was better to have the agreements before they needed them anyways. “And I say there’s no time like the present to get started.” Especially if Sienna was frustrated with whatever she had been doing before Jamie came in, it would be more productive for them to start working on their side project, and return to brewing for the apothecary when they were in a better headspace. “We can use my station to get away from the beans,” Jamie added. That would be better than dodging all the beans currently on Sienna’s table.

Sienna Aurélie Linslee

[Sienna Aurélie Linslee]

Sienna always liked to say that the first ingredient of any potion was patience. How many times had she seen amateur potioneers quit because their first attempt at a potion failed? Or their second, or third…the best things in life required a little bit of R&D before success, and this would be no different. Jamie had the right attitude, and that was enough for now to keep Si’s hopes up that they’d be able to puzzle something out. It was certainly easier than looking at their giant to-do list (which for the most part was a giant question mark).

“I couldn’t agree more,” Si affirmed at Jamie’s proposition to get started. “I always use fresh ingredients for my own projects. There’s a little farm I know where we can harvest fresh wolfsbane. For now…” In all honesty, Sienna sometimes forgot about her magic and resorted to the old-fashioned way of locating things by hand. It didn’t work particularly well considering how disorganized her things could be. This time, she pulled out her wand and began to summon the basics – her favorite scales, a nice brass cauldron, and so on. She grinned at Jamie, feeling more in her element now that some brewing was due to start. “This is always my favorite part,” Sienna confessed, moving her things to Jamie’s workspace. “Not the beans,” she added as an afterthought. “I need a terribly long break from those. But gathering the ingredients, prepping the cauldron…” She shrugged. “It’s exciting, isn’t it? To create something that didn’t exist before.”

@jamie

[Deleted]

Sienna said she always used fresh ingredients for her own projects, and Jamie nodded along. It was easier to get fresh ingredients now that she was working at an apothecary – she could just add a little extra onto the apothecary’s order and still get the bulk pricing afforded by the larger order. Jamie was more than a little surprised that Sienna knew a place they could harvest wolfsbane from; as far as the Hufflepuff knew, not that many people grew it. Sienna admitted that this was her favorite part, the preparation, and Jamie blinked.

“I suppose it’s exciting. But I like the results better – seeing whether or not all the effort was worth something.” Of course, even if they failed (and they were certainly going to fail, given the ambition of their project) they were going to learn something valuable, so it wasn’t like their efforts would be worth nothing, but there was nothing quite as sweet as a potion turning out exactly the way it was intended. Jamie summoned some of her things over to her table as well, most notably a roll of parchment and a quill. She would have to get herself a journal eventually, but loose paper for making notes was imperative. “Do you want to do the honors?” Jamie asked, gesturing towards their instructions.

Sienna Aurélie Linslee

[Sienna Aurélie Linslee]

Sienna could see Jamie searching for parchment and a quill, and it didn’t seem like a bad idea so Si did the same. She had already dug out her notebook from the mess that was her desk, but she also grabbed some loose parchment before dragging her stool over to Jamie’s work area. Si nodded along at Jamie’s response. “Sure, who doesn’t?” Si asked. “I think I threw a book the first time I tried to create something new. Saying it blew up in my face would be an…understatement.”

The instructions had been left by the unattended cauldron, so Sienna grabbed the parchment she’d brought over and laid it side-by-side with the other papers. She took her wand to start copying the ingredients list and brewing instructions onto multiple new pages. Just to be safe – Si didn’t trust herself not to lose such an important paper. When Jamie asked if Sienna would like to do the honors, she nodded vigorously and picked up the original (now fairly crumpled) sheet. She took a moment to read over the first few lines. “Looks like we’ll need valerian root, powdered silver, moonstones, moonseed, wolfsbane, dittany…” The list seemed to go on and on. “Let’s head to the front, we should have some of this already.”

@jamie

[Deleted]

Jamie scrunched her face in sympathy when Sienna said she had thrown a book the first time she tried to create something. Jamie didn’t have much of a temper, so she didn’t think she’d ever go quite that far, but she could understand the frustration. “The book or the potion?” Jamie teased when Sienna mentioned it blowing up in her face. If throwing a book could cause an explosion, the Hogwarts library would have ceased to exist a long while ago, but it was still a nice thought.

“We definitely have valerian root and dittany,” Jamie said when Sienna read out the list. Valerian was used for sleeping potions so it was sold fairly often to potioneers who wanted to make their own. Essence of dittany could be used to help with wounds, so dittany itself was also sold to that end. It was the less common ingredients – wolfsbane especially – Jamie doubted they had. Still, she opened the door from the back room and stepped out into the front, relieved there weren’t any customers at the moment. She didn’t mind people, but she was focused on her task. Jamie made a beeline towards where she knew the dittany was, then gathered the valerian. “Any luck?” She asked, hoping Sienna had managed to find at least some of the other ingredients.

Sienna Aurélie Linslee

[Sienna Aurélie Linslee]

There was an undeniable cheeriness that always involved the process of brewing potions with a partner. When she was alone, Sienna couldn’t help but become laser-focused on her cauldron, carefully measuring out ingredients and maybe adding little flourishes or new twists on old recipes here and there. Working with Jamie was a completely different experience, one with banter and idle chatter as they worked. It was…nice, not having to keep her guard up all the time. Something she could do with more often.

Jamie had wandered over towards the dittany, so Si started at the other end of the shop. She rolled her eyes playfully at Jamie’s question. “I won’t even dignity that with a response,” she teased, turning her back with a flourish. At Jamie’s question, Si rattled the box of moonstones she’d been examining. “We have plenty of moonstone in stock, definitely nothing that’ll be missed.” She frowned as she scanned the shelves and barrels for moonseed before she finally noticed a nearly empty container with only a few limp leaves left inside. Sienna sighed at the sight. “No good on the moonseed. It’s rather important, we’ll have to reorder right away.” She turned to examine the dittany and valerian Jamie had gathered. “Do we even stock wolfsbane? I’ve…honestly never checked.”

@jamie