Hermione spent most of the walk to lunch talking through exactly how she'd arrived at the successful transformation — the mental image she'd used, the adjustments she'd made between attempts, what she thought she'd done differently on the fifth try versus the fourth. Kevin walked beside her and listened, inserting a question every so often when she seemed to be circling a conclusion she hadn't quite reached yet, and watched her arrive at it with the particular satisfaction of someone working something out in real time.
Harry and Ron trailed behind them at a distance that said, clearly and without words, we cannot follow this conversation and we have accepted that fact.
They ate lunch together at the Gryffindor table, Harry working steadily through a plate of food with the focused efficiency of someone who'd learned not to count on regular meals. Kevin, glancing over, set down his fork.
"Harry. You've looked at the Potions textbook yet?"
Harry looked up. His expression was blank.
Hermione looked at Kevin sideways. She was the one who pushed studying. Why was he asking Harry?
"Professor Snape teaches Potions," Kevin said, keeping his tone conversational. "Word is he knew your parents. Didn't have a particularly warm relationship with your father." He let that settle for a moment. "It might be worth being prepared, is all I'm saying."
Harry sat up straighter. Hermione leaned in slightly — any information about Harry's parents, she had noticed, got his full attention immediately. Ron paused mid-chew.
"I came across something in Diagon Alley. A book, secondhand — it had notes in the margins about various professors, school gossip, that kind of thing." He waved a hand. "I'm probably remembering it wrong. An orphan can hardly be expected to know much about family history."
He delivered this last line with the serene composure of someone playing a very reliable card, and watched it land exactly as intended. Harry's expression shifted — that quiet recognition again, the one Kevin had seen on the train — and the follow-up questions dissolved.
Harry, however, took a different lesson from it than Kevin had intended. Rather than opening his Potions textbook, he disappeared to the library after lunch to hunt down whatever gossip he could find about James and Lily Potter. Ron went with him, in the loyal, slightly baffled way that Ron did most things.
Kevin found a Potions textbook and sat down next to Hermione.
He had been genuinely looking forward to Potions since before he'd arrived at Hogwarts. Felix Felicis. Veritaserum. The Elixir of Life. The sheer usefulness of the subject — the way it could alter reality through chemistry and intent, without relying on the raw magical power that Kevin's stats currently had sitting at a very modest seven. Potions rewarded intelligence, patience, and precision. He had all three.
He also desperately wanted the Half-Blood Prince's annotated copy of Advanced Potion-Making, and he needed to be in a position to actually use it when he found it.
They worked through the afternoon. When the dungeon classroom door banged open at the start of the lesson, Kevin was ready.
Snape entered the way he did everything — as though the room had been waiting for him, and was now aware of having been wasted on lesser purposes until his arrival. He moved to the front without hurrying, let his gaze travel across the rows of first-years, and began.
"There will be no wand-waving in this classroom." His voice was quiet and precise, which somehow made it carry better than shouting. "No foolish incantations. No childish accidents, hopefully."
He paused. Let the silence work.
"Potion-making is a discipline of subtlety. Of patience. Of scientific precision. It demands from its practitioner a quality of mind that most of you — " a slow survey of the room, " — have not yet demonstrated any evidence of possessing."
Kevin was watching Harry doodle absent-minded patterns in the corner of his parchment and nudged him under the table. Harry straightened.
Snape continued: "The truly capable among you — and I use that phrase in the loosest possible sense — may eventually learn to brew a potion that prevents death. That controls truth. That adjusts the very architecture of luck." A pause. "I said eventually."
Kevin's hand went up.
Snape ignored it. His gaze moved to the left side of the room, where Neville was already looking as though he'd made a grave error in coming to Hogwarts at all.
Kevin kept his hand up.
Snape looked at him. Then looked away again.
Kevin maintained the hand.
There was a silence of about four seconds, which was longer than it sounds in a room full of eleven-year-olds trying not to breathe.
"Mr. Kevin," Snape said, with the tone of someone conceding a point against their better judgement.
"Professor." Kevin lowered his arm. "Does brewing the Elixir of Life require the Philosopher's Stone as a base component, or is the Stone simply the most efficient catalyst? I've seen conflicting accounts."
The room went very quiet.
Not the silence of boredom. The silence of thirty children collectively deciding that this other child had possibly lost his mind.
Hermione's pencil had stopped moving. She was staring at Kevin with an expression that managed to be simultaneously impressed and alarmed, which was, Kevin had noticed, a look she'd been refining since the train.
Snape crossed the room slowly. He stopped at Kevin's table, close enough that Kevin had to look up, and regarded him with the particular expression of a man who has found something unexpected and is deciding how to classify it.
"What," he said softly, "makes you think you have any business asking something that idiotic, that presumptuous, and that astronomically beyond your current level?"
"You said the subject rewards ambition," Kevin said.
"I said talent. First."
"So — does it?"
The room held its breath.
"Mr. Kevin." Snape's voice dropped half a register. "Narcissus bulb powder in artemisia stem sap. What is the result?"
"Water of Life and Death. A potent sleeping draught — the balance between the two creates the sedative effect rather than cancelling it out."
A beat.
"Dung heap composition. Origin."
"Goat's stomach, primarily. The bacterial breakdown is what creates the phosphorescent properties."
"And the distinction between Aconitum carmichaelii and Aconitum kusnezoffii in their prepared forms?"
"There isn't one. Chemically identical at the stage they'd be added. The distinction matters at harvest, not preparation."
Silence.
Snape looked at him for a long moment. His face gave nothing away, which was itself a kind of information.
"Mr. Kevin has demonstrated the ability to memorise a textbook," he said at last, his voice carrying clearly to the back of the room. "Impressive, in the way that a trained monkey is impressive. You believe this qualifies you to ask questions above your station?"
"I don't think knowledge has a station, Professor."
Several people around the room looked as though they were trying very hard to become furniture.
Draco Malfoy, two rows back, was wearing the expression of someone watching a man step deliberately off a cliff.
"Heh." Snape's smile arrived slowly, like ice forming. "Heh heh heh."
It was not a warm sound.
"Knowledge," he said, "lives in this classroom. I dispense it as I see fit. You will sit quietly, brew what I assign, and perhaps — in a few years — earn the right to ask questions that don't waste my time." He held Kevin's gaze for another moment. "Clear?"
"Perfectly, Professor."
Snape turned, walked to the front of the room, and launched into the lesson without further comment. Harry, Ron, and Hermione all managed to pass Kevin tiny looks of solidarity without moving their heads. Kevin acknowledged none of them, keeping his expression attentive and neutral.
Snape demonstrated the Healing Potion with the efficiency of someone who found teaching slightly beneath him but had decided to do it correctly anyway. His hands were precise, the ingredients added at intervals that seemed casual but were evidently exact — Kevin watched and filed away every movement, every pause, every small adjustment.
When he finished, the resulting potion glowed a clear amber-gold that caught the dungeon lamplight like something from a jeweller's cabinet. It was, Kevin had to admit, beautiful.
"You will attempt this," Snape said. "I expect nothing usable. I will be satisfied by the absence of visible fumes, structural failure, or anyone requiring medical attention." His gaze found Kevin. "You, Mr. Kevin, will work alone. If you cannot produce a satisfactory result by the end of class, you'll remain here until you do."
"And if I do?" Kevin asked.
"You're not there yet." Snape turned away. "Begin."
Kevin looked at his cauldron. Then at his ingredients. Then at the notes he'd been taking.
He arranged everything in order of addition, checked his textbook's timeline against what he'd observed from Snape's demonstration, and lit the flame. Behind him, Harry and Ron were already quietly bickering about ingredient ratios. Hermione was measuring with the careful precision of someone who had decided to leave nothing to chance.
Kevin settled in.
His first attempt finished before anyone else's. The potion was the right colour — a pale amber rather than the clear gold of Snape's, the shade of cheap ale next to a single malt — and he set it beside his cauldron and waited.
Snape arrived, unscrewed the vial, sniffed it once.
"Thirty points," he said, as though each word cost him something personally. "Marginally better than competent dishwater."
"Could you tell me where specifically it fell short, Professor?"
Snape looked at him. Something moved in his expression that wasn't quite contempt — more like a professor presented with a question they hadn't expected to be sincere.
"Your timing on the third addition was a full beat late. The heat compensation window had already closed. And your quantity of the Rejuvenating Herb was insufficient — by about half. Even a field mouse wouldn't register the effect."
"Understood. Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Do better."
Kevin bottled the thirty-point batch, cleaned his cauldron, and started again. This time he set his pocket watch on the bench beside him and counted down the intervals in his head, cross-referencing against the second hand. He thought about Snape's hands — the fold of the herb stalk, the twist, the wringing motion that extracted roughly thirty percent more active compound than a simple press would.
He tried the same motion. His hands were less practised, the result messier, but the approach was right.
The second batch took shape differently. Less rushed, more deliberate. When it finished, it was closer — not the gold of Snape's, but moving in that direction.
Snape came by again. He picked up the vial. There was a pause — not long, but longer than the first.
"Fifty-nine points."
Kevin stood up straight, hands settling naturally on his hips. "That's almost double. Where's the last point?"
"The arrogance is noted," Snape said quietly. "Any troll who practised for a week could match fifty-nine."
"I don't believe that, Professor."
"Then you're an idiot." But something in Snape's voice had shifted, slightly — the register of dismissal that is used to end conversations you were never expecting to have. "Everyone else — dismissed. You." The faintest pause. "Until it's right."
He swept out.
The class filed past, most of them shooting Kevin looks that ran from sympathetic to quietly smug. Hermione lingered longest.
"You didn't have to push him," she said. "He was clearly already — "
"I'm fine," Kevin said. "Go on. I want to keep working."
She looked at him for a moment. Then nodded and left.
Alone, Kevin didn't start a third batch immediately. He sat down at the bench, laid out his notes from both attempts, and looked at them side by side.
Then he looked at Snape's potion, still sitting on the front podium in its glass vial, catching the last of the lamplight.
He walked up to it. Picked it up.
Poured a small measure into one of his own vials. Set it next to a measure of his own fifty-nine-point batch. Studied both. He retrieved a small knife from the ingredient bench, drew it swiftly across the back of his forearm, and drank his own potion first.
The bleeding stopped. The wound sealed unevenly, the skin pulling together slowly. His arm itched along the line of it.
He made a note. Then cut again beside the first mark, and drank Snape's.
The difference was immediate. Both wounds — old and new — began to close cleanly, evenly, the skin knitting smooth and colour returning to his face in a warm, spreading flush. The pain didn't just recede; it disappeared, replaced by something he could only describe as vigour. Not just healed. Restored.
Kevin set the empty vial down.
He added a pain-blocker. And an energising compound — not in the textbook. He pressed two fingers to his forearm, where the skin was already smooth. Clever. The additions don't compete with the base formula — they complement the physiological state of someone who's been hurt. Pain gone, energy restored, healing accelerated.
"Damn," Kevin muttered, glancing toward the door. Empty.
He crouched over his bench and started writing.
He didn't notice the time passing. That was the thing about potions — there was always another variable, always another question the experiment raised before it answered the last one. He raided the supply shelves for components he recognised from the textbook, cross-referenced Snape's motions from memory, and brewed and adjusted and brewed again.
Hours went.
The door opened a crack. Three heads appeared — Harry, Ron, Hermione, carrying bread and a flask of pumpkin juice, looking guilty and half-delighted with themselves.
"Kevin — we brought food — "
He didn't look up. His hands were moving through a step that needed finishing.
They fell quiet.
He became aware of them again when the batch finished — a sharp, clear amber-gold, the colour matching Snape's like a reflection in water.
"Yes."
He grabbed the knife. Drove it into his palm with a purposeful motion that made all three of his visitors go pale.
He drank.
The wound closed in under forty seconds, clean and complete. Even the old cuts from earlier vanished as the potion worked back through them, leaving skin that looked as though nothing had ever happened.
Kevin stood up straight, hands on his hips, and laughed.
In the shadows by the supply cabinet, behind a concealment charm, Snape dipped one finger into the cauldron and tasted it. He stood completely still for a moment. Then he looked at the desk — the explosion of notes, the ranked vials, the systematic evidence of a mind that had spent four hours not giving up.
He uncapped a vial, wrote 99 on the label in his precise script, and set it on the bench. Then he left.
The System spoke the moment the door closed.
[Ding! Detected that the host has gained the approval of a key figure: Snape.] [Hidden panel unlocked: Talent Panel.] [Reward: Potions Talent +5, Charms Talent +5]
[Name: Kevin Croft]
[Constitution: 15 | Magic: 7 | Intelligence: 20]
[Talents — average wizard: 5]
[Charms Talent: 11]
[Potions Talent: 15]
[Alchemy Talent: 5]
[Flight Talent: 1]
[Available Attribute Points: 0 | Available Talent Points: 0]
Kevin stared at the vial on the bench. 99.
He stared at the door. Then at the vial again.
The old bat was here.
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My friend said this community doesn't appreciate quality Fanfic. I told him he was dead wrong.
Join my cause. Hit Powerstone. Drop a review. Stick with me and I will drown you in updates.
Top 10 by next week. Let's shut him up for good.