A/N: Hi everybody! I know it's taken me awhile to update this, but I wanted to give the perfect ending and had writers block for quite some time. I hope you can forgive me. Anyway, here's the final chapter. If anybody has any other ideas for a follow up or any other kind of fic then let me know because I'm officially on summer vacation (yippee!) and I'll have a lot of free time to write.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.

Chapter 5: Taste

Rose Weasley stood in front of the full length mirror that all of the sixth year girls shared. She had detention at eight with Scorpius and was trying to figure out what she should wear. It was difficult picking an outfit for a detention that one would be spending with somebody that they may or may not fancy…a lot. The new realization made her feel a combination of nervous, excited, guilty and disgusted with herself. She scrunched up her face at the cluster of emotions that she was feeling.

"This is so stupid" Rose muttered as she tried to get a look at her backside in the mirror, making sure that it didn't look too large or too small…or whatever it was that girls looked for when they checked their backsides in the mirror. She knew that it was useless to try and pick an outfit that was flattering but didn't look like she was trying too hard. She also knew that she was probably going to get dirty anyway so trying at all was useless and she should be wearing a pair of old sweats… but she couldn't keep the nagging thought out of her brain that she still kind of wanted to look halfway presentable. It wasn't fair that Scorpius would probably look amazing no matter what he wore. He could parade around in a potato sack and a large sum of the females at Hogwarts would STILL fancy him.

"Since when do you care about what you look like?" Amelia asked absentmindedly from her bed as she tried to finish her Herbology homework, obviously amused. A small smile was tugging at the corner of her lips. Her fringe covered her line of vision so she didn't see the glare that Rose shot her.

"I don't care," Rose said as she vigorously yanked her favorite blouse over her head and threw it on the floor carelessly. "I just thought I'd try out a new look. There's nothing wrong with wanting to change my appearance" she stated huffily as she kneeled back in front of her trunk to look for something else. Why did her mom insist on her bringing every Weasley sweater she owned? She could have packed so many more clothes if it weren't for those awful things.

"Oh, okay, so you decide to try out a new look right before you go to detention with Malfoy…that makes perfect sense."

"Shut up, Amelia."

Walking the castle alone at night always gave Rose the willies. The lanterns casted an eerie glow on the stone walls and it felt like every one of her moves was being recorded by some unnamed entity. It was almost as if she moved too fast, she would break some sort of unsaid rule that existed between the walls. Of course, heading to the dungeons also added to the creepiness. She had decided to wear a sweatshirt and jeans, nothing too fancy. Amelia had been right; it would have looked suspicious if she wore a blouse or something nice. She realized that putting on her favorite set of dress robes was taking it a bit too far and that when Amelia bounced off her bed and handed her a pair of jeans a sweatshirt, she was only looking out for her. Amelia had her few moments of common sense, so when she did Rose usually listened.

What bugged Rose more was that she knew the exact reason why she wanted to look presentable, and who she wanted to impress. She shook her head at the knowledge that she had completely and utterly fallen for Scorpius Malfoy…and that these feelings probably existed long before she was willing to admit them. She knew that it was her pride that had kept her at bay for so long, and the fact that if Malfoy found out he would undoubtedly be a total and complete git about it and taunt her forever. By the time she was done pondering all of these thoughts of her potential embarrassment that she would never live down, she had arrived at the dungeons, and was eye to eye with Scorpius…

Scorpius looked in the mirror and checked his teeth one last time before he scowled and mentally kicked himself for feeling nervous. "I look great" he thought to himself, a little bit smugly, as he straightened out his pale gray jumper and dark blue jeans. Scorpius never told anybody, but he always thought his eye for fashion to be one of his strongest points.

"So you're sure there's no more spinach, right?" Scorpius asked Clarence as he picked at invisible pieces that he thought still resided in his perfectly white smile.

"Yes, I'm sure. I told you not to have the spinach." Clarence chuckled as he watched is best friend preen subconsciously for Weasley. "So, uh, is this like a date you two are going on or just some casual hangout?"

"Neither," Scorpius said, rather annoyed, as he tied his trainers, trying to distract himself from thinking of all the things that could possibly happen in this detention. This detention could make or break his future with Miss. Know-It-All, so he had to be prepared. He smiled dumbly at the recollection of their last encounter.

"Are you okay?" Clarence asked, as his friend's faced changed from one of agitation to pure bliss. Scorpius seemed to come out of his reverie and scowled at his friend for ruining his daydream.

"I gotta go, see you in a few hours." Scorpius took one last look in the mirror and grabbed his wand before walking briskly out of the dormitory, leaving a befuddled Clarence in his wake. Scorpius almost felt bad for his obviously confused friend, but not bad enough to explain himself. He didn't want to let anything slip before anything actually happened. And plus, if he told Clarence that he fancied Rose and then she rejected him, he would never be able to live it down. Divulging any details now would just be messy and Scorpius hated messes, and these feelings were messy enough.

It wasn't far to the Potions Classroom from the dormitory since they were in close proximity and by the time Scorpius had reached the door, Rose was also fast approaching. Her face was screwed up in what looked like deep thought, and she obviously hadn't seen him yet. She looked really pretty tonight, as if she had unintentionally known that he was going to be on edge and she should look super pretty, just to push him over.

Rose and Scorpius reached the Potions classroom at almost the exact same time. Rose's face quickly changed to that of annoyance

"So…" she started.

"So…" Scorpius mimicked, sweaty hands in his pockets.

This is getting ridiculous Rose thought to herself as they both stood outside the classroom, neither saying anything... She starting to get seriously scared of being enveloped by the nervous energy that she was sure could be felt a mile away. "I guess I'll open the door then." She said awkwardly, trying not to sound rude.

"Oh, thanks." Scorpius said distractedly as he walked in with Rose following close behind. Wow, great way to not look like a prat right there. Letting the girl hold the door open for you…good job, Casanova.

Professor Vane was sitting at her desk with a stack of scrolls in front of her. She had her quill in her mouth as she murmured the words to someone's essay. It must not have been a very good one because a scowl approached her face and she made several quick scratches with her quill before looking up and noticing Scorpius and Rose staring at her expectantly.

"Oh dear, you frightened me. Both of you look absolutely miserable, I do hope everything's all right?" she looked at one and then the other. Scorpius offered a smile while Rose shrugged. Teenagers were so hard to understand sometimes, especially these two.

"Okay…well, right then. Anyway, you both will be organizing my stores of ingredients and taking inventory because honestly, it's too bothersome for me to do. I'll give one of you the checklist, so make sure everything is there before you're done. It shouldn't take more than two hours." Professor Vane said as fast as possible, not wanting to see their expressions of horror at having to be put in that stuffy closet with one another for that long. Luckily, they remained expressionless as Professor Vane handed Rose the checklist and they made their way to the closet which contained all of the ingredients.

"Now, I know that there are some ingredients in here that are prohibited for students to use and they're charmed to stay closed…so don't even try using them. Good luck." Professor Vane said as she shut the door and let the two bask in the mess that was the potions storage closet.

"Do you know how to do this?" Scorpius asked Rose as she stared up at the shelves of various ingredients. She was guessing that some of them hadn't been used since her parents had attended Hogwarts.

"No idea" Rose said as she maneuvered the ladder that was leaning against the wall and hoisted herself up. "Hold this, would you?" she asked, shoving the list at Scorpius. He folded his arms and shook his head.

"No way Princess, I'm going to be the one on the ladder. You're going to fall and hurt yourself and then you'll have your dad come and kill me for being negligent. Not only that, but how will I know if you count the amount of ingredients correctly? Rose narrowed her eyes angrily at Scorpius' look of smug satisfaction at insulting her multiple times in one breath of air.

"For your information, Malfoy, I am perfectly capable of standing on a bloody ladder without falling and I can also count past ten, which I'm sure is something you have trouble doing. Just take the list and mark things down when I tell you. Believe it or not I have things to do and don't want to be here all night." That was totally false, Rose thought to herself as she started organizing and counting. She had nothing to do, but she wanted Scorpius to think otherwise. Just in case he thought that he knew that she wanted to be with him instead of in the dorm with Amelia. Well, if he DID think that, then that was just totally conceited and he should be slapped for thinking that. Rose tried to forget all about what Scorpius may or may not be thinking as she started working.

An hour or so passed without much talking, except for when Rose had to tell Scorpius how many of this or that there were and if anything was broken. Rose would move the ladder around Scorpius, who wouldn't budge even after countless requests and minor badgering. After she had counted and organized all of the ingredients at the top and him on the bottom, they completely stopped talking for awhile and were lost in their own thoughts. Rose thought of how Scorpius must feel so high and mighty, being able to play with people's emotions and get away with it. She felt disgusted that she could even think about fancying him and started slamming things around the angrier she got, not noticing Scorpius calling her from below.

"HEY Weasley, wow…okay, now that you're back on planet Earth, can you tell me how many jars of armadillo vile we have again?" Scorpius asked as he looked up and down the list. Rose faltered at first then regained her composure "Umm…six." She replied as she counted the jars. Since Scorpius had broken the quiet reverie, the awkward tension had returned, which Rose tried not to notice as she stepped down from the ladder. Scorpius was holding on to it to keep it steady.

"So I guess we can just work on the middle shelves together and then we'll be done" Scorpius said as he handed her back the list so she could see their progress. Rose nodded unemotionally and began to work, angry at her ability to show the exact opposite of what she was really feeling. Scorpius huffed loudly in an attempt to display his annoyance at her mood swings.

"Ha…look it's the Potions book we had first year!" Scorpius said as he pulled the misplaced book from a random shelf. He blew the dust off it and started flipping through the tattered pages. It must have been one of the books that had become too damaged to use throughout the years. Rose immediately recognized the worn out and dilapidated copy as her own.

Her parents had bought her a brand new book but she had carelessly dropped it in a mud puddle and had to use James's instead, who made her pay 5 sicles for it. His was tattered up already because he hated Potions almost as much as she did and didn't care what happened to the book. At the end of first year she was so fed up with Potions she just left the textbook under her worktable and forgot about it. Rose definitely hadn't expected to see it again, and had completely forgotten about the RW+SM that she had drawn in the front cover and most of the pages…oops. It wasn't after a few moments of silence and page flipping that Rose remembered. Her eyes widened in horror.

"Give that book to me." Rose said as she stood up and reached for it. Scorpius looked at her questioningly and put it over his head so she had no way to get it. After a few minutes of "give it to me or I'll hex you!" and failed attempts to get the book back, she finally gave up and huffed angrily.

"I don't know why you care so much, it's just a stupid book" Scorpius said, a smirk making its way onto his features at her annoyance.

"Never mind" Rose said, head in her hands as she waited for Scorpius to notice. He leaned back against the ladder and flipped a few more pages in silence. His eyebrows scrunched together as he saw what Rose was making a commotion about. In a corner of page 287, right next to a doodle of a Kenmare Kestrel leprechaun were the initials RW+SM, as plain as day. Scorpius flipped back to the front of the book and saw "Rose Weasley" written in sloppy handwriting. He remembered a time in their first year where she didn't seem to hate his guts, but he never thought she would have fancied him. He saw Rose, who still had her head in her hands, utterly embarrassed. As he went through more pages he noticed that some of his initials had big X's over them and even a few quill stabbings.

"When did you STOP fancying me in first year?" Scorpius asked, a bit amused at her overreaction. Rose perked up immediately and frowned in concentration, trying to remember the exact event that had caused her such anger. Her frown deepened as she remembered. She licked her lips before she began her explanation.

"It was when you chucked that spoonful of pudding at me in front of everybody in the great hall at the Halloween Feast." She said bemusedly...Her cheeks were tinged pink again at the thought of the embarrassing and terrible memory. Scorpius was looking at her with an odd expression on his face. "Do you remember?" she asked, mistaking his look as confusion.

"I think so. Well, you kind of deserved it. You made me look like a fool in Charms." He said with a smirk on his face. Rose's mouth was open in mock horror.

"I was only trying to help you…help you…I can't even remember what it was we were trying to do, but now you know I was only trying to help you so you would think I was smart and fancy me like I fancied you." She replied, gaining back some confidence. She turned away from Scorpius and began to arrange things on the middle shelves again. He stepped next to her and she could smell that same familiar scent that had been present in her Amortentia potion. They worked together, in unison, in a comfortable silence until Scorpius cleared his throat and broke it.

"I think that I would have figured out your intelligence somehow anyway. You're one of the smartest witches in our year. Someone would have to be completely off their rocker not to know that you were smart…well at everything but Potions." Rose rolled her eyes as she tried to hide her smile. Scorpius kept talking, the words coming out before he could think. "If I wouldn't have chucked the pudding at you, would you still have fancied me? Is that why you've always hated me… because I threw pudding at you?" he asked with a serious tone in his voice. "Because if you ask me, that's a pretty rotten reason."

"I never…hated you. I don't hate you..." Rose sputtered, unsure of what was going to happen next. She couldn't be sure if Scorpius was angry or not.

"Yes you do…you tell me all the time. You told me last week, you tell me whenever we win a match against you, sometimes you mouth it at me when—"

"Okay, okay I get it. I never really meant it though. I guess I just…I don't know." Rose said; her hands were starting to shake at the unexpected confrontation. She realized Scorpius was still looking at her expectantly. "I thought that I had to protect myself from you otherwise I would seriously fall for you… and not in that first year infatuation kind of way. So I decided from that moment on that I would hate you simply for the purpose of proving that I could." Rose mumbled, her hands becoming shakier. She wasn't sure if it was from the nerves or just for the fact that she was admitting everything that she had been feeling for so long. Finally she looked up at Scorpius, who had an intense expression on his face.

She decided to continue anyway, seeing as there was no going back and she might as well just get it all out. "And then weird things started happening. Girls started to fancy you left and right and I just wanted to prove that I wasn't like every other girl. Then when we had to brew the Amortentia potion things got really weird because…well because I smelled… you." Rose made sure she kept her eyes on her hands and didn't look up. There was more silence, except this time it was noticeably awkward. Rose felt like crying. She had made herself look stupid and now he was going to go tell everybody that Rose Weasley had a creepy crush on him and thought his smell was erotic or something stupid like that…Great. She still had another whole year to live with this torture.

"I smelled you in my Amortentia too." Scorpius said as he scratched his neck nervously. He watched as Rose looked up at him with shock written all over her face. She looked back down and he took it as a sign to continue. He could feel himself turning beat red for once. It was humiliating to have to do this in the potions storage closet. In the short time he had realized he really had fallen for Rose Weasley, he had not expected to be telling it to her here. It was a surreal moment, as if everything was moving in and out of focus. Well, there was no going back now. "I've fancied you since first year, Rose. I never stopped. I guess it just took me awhile to realize it. And you, well you were just awful. I'm sorry to say it but you treated me like downright rubbish and sometimes it really hurt." Scorpius felt like a moron, he hated sharing feelings and looking vulnerable.

Rose didn't say anything, she felt terrible that she made Scorpius feel like that. True, sometimes he was a pretentious prat and needed to be put in his place…but he was right, she did treat him unfairly. She turned around and sat on the floor, feeling angry at herself and ashamed. She pulled her knees up to her chest and looked at the ground. Scorpius sighed and sat down too, facing Rose. It wasn't until he brushed her hair out of her face that she seemed to notice he was there. She couldn't lie to herself, his touch sent shivers down her spine. Scorpius still hadn't removed his hand from her face and started to stroke her cheek. Rose felt like she couldn't breathe as he moved his head closer to hers.

"Hey, it's okay. Don't worry you didn't do any permanent damage to my ego" Scorpius said as he inched closer and closer. Rose would have rolled her eyes, except for the fact that Scorpius was invading her personal space and she felt like she was glued to where she was sitting. Her breath was coming in short rasps as he closed the distance between them.

Finally their lips touched tentatively and Scorpius truly realized that this really was the point of no return, which sounded completely cheesy in his head but he didn't care at that exact moment. He wanted to be with Rose Weasley, consequences be damned. And if being with her made him think and say weird phrases like "the point of no return" and being "put under her spell", then he didn't care. Her lips were soft and tasted like her strawberry chapstick. He wanted to relish this moment forever, it was absolutely perfect. Out of all the girls Scorpius had kissed in his life, he knew that this girl was going to be the one that would be etched in his memory forever. He wanted to take a piece of this with him wherever he went. He tried to memorize the flush of her cheeks, the feeling of the hairs at the nape of her neck and the way their lips fit perfectly together like two puzzle pieces that had been apart for far too long.

Rose didn't react at first…she was too shocked to do anything but feel the softness of his lips on hers. Once she realized what was going on she started reciprocating and locked her hands around Scorpius' neck. She could feel him smiling and had to resist the urge to do so herself. She tangled her hands in his hair and knew that this was what she had been missing for so long; everything clicked.

Forty five minutes later, two swollen lipped, messy haired teenagers walked out of the Potions Closet. Their hands were clasped and they had the silliest grins on their faces, as if they were keeping a secret. Scorpius handed the list to Professor Vane and continued walking with Rose. Outside the Potions door they had to part ways and after five minutes of intense snogging Rose had to pull herself away for fear of not being able to if she stayed any later. Scorpius watched her go with a hazy expression on his face, as if he couldn't believe that the last hour had actually taken place.

As Rose walked back into the dormitory she caught a quick glimpse of herself in the mirror. Her hair was a mess and was sticking out in weird places, her mouth was still swollen, and she had a small patch of dirt on her nose from all of the dust in the closet. Her eyes were also bloodshot from being so tired…but for once she didn't care if she was pretty or ugly or had noticeable eyes or strange colored hair. At that moment she felt like the most beautiful and wanted girl in the world.

The End

Hope you all liked it. Review please, it only helps me improve :).