The System ping hit Kevin like cold water.
He spun around. The dungeon was empty — torchlight, the smell of herbs and spent cauldrons, the quiet that settles into stone rooms after everyone has left. No Snape.
Which meant concealment charm. Which meant Snape had been standing somewhere in this room for an unknown amount of time, watching him work.
Kevin replayed the last hour in his memory with mounting horror.
Mr. Big Bones. Makka Pakka. Dark Lord, answer my call.
He put his face in his hands.
"Kevin?" Hermione was watching him from the doorway, the bread still in her hand, her expression moving through several stages of concern. "Are you all right? You've been laughing for the past five minutes and now you look like you've been arrested."
"I'm fine." He packed his notes with the focused speed of a man trying not to think about anything. His eyes caught the vial on the bench — 99 in Snape's handwriting. He picked it up carefully, as one might handle evidence, and tucked it into his bag.
"Kevin, what happened? Your hand — is that — " Hermione stopped. She had noticed the cuts. Old ones, new ones, in various stages of healed along his left hand and forearm. "Those are knife marks."
"Testing the potion. They're healed now — look." He held up his arm. The skin was clean and smooth, no trace of any of it. "Totally fine."
"You cut yourself. Repeatedly. To test a potion."
"That's the standard method."
"It absolutely is not —"
"The good news," Kevin said, hoisting his bag onto his shoulder, "is that the potion works. Remarkably well." He nodded toward the door. "I'm genuinely desperate for food and I'd prefer not to stay in this room any longer than necessary."
She looked at him for another three seconds, clearly running calculations about whether to pursue this further. Then she handed him the bread and said nothing, which Kevin recognised as a form of tactical retreat.
Harry and Ron flanked him on the walk back, both of them exuding the subtle anxiety of people who weren't sure what had just happened but knew it had been significant.
"Snape kept us away from the door," Ron said. "All evening. Came out twice and just stared at us until we backed up."
"He's fine," Kevin said, eating the bread. "It was potions prep. I learned a lot, actually."
"You're defending Snape now?" Ron said.
"I'm saying it wasn't pointless." Kevin thought about the 99 sitting in his bag. "Go to sleep. I'll explain more when I've had eight hours."
He did not explain more. He slept for ten hours, woke up refreshed, and decided to find the whole thing funny, which was a much more productive response.
The pattern established itself over the following weeks with the inevitability of a timetable.
Every few days, with no warning and no discernible system, Snape would materialise from somewhere in Kevin's vicinity and say his name. Kevin would follow him to the dungeons. Snape would hand him a list.
The lists were demanding in the way that good training is demanding — relentless in scope, specific in technique, each one building on the last in ways that only became obvious in retrospect. Kevin would work through them alone in Snape's office while the man himself vanished somewhere, reappearing occasionally to offer critiques that were uniformly cutting and precisely correct. Kevin wrote down everything Snape said, no matter how it was phrased, and used it.
His potions talent at fifteen meant the work accelerated faster than either of them might have expected. The gap between what the textbooks could teach him and what practice was teaching him closed quickly. By mid-October he could have brewed a decent Healing Potion in three attempts where it had taken him a dozen on that first evening, and the dozen had been necessary to understand why three was now enough.
He didn't tell Harry and Ron this. He told Hermione, because Hermione would find it interesting, and she did.
Charms was clicking. His talent score and intelligence combined to make the first-year material feel like groundwork rather than challenge — he understood the underlying logic, which meant the spells came relatively naturally. Magic capacity was still his limiting factor, and he was careful with it, but within those limits he was performing solidly.
Herbology was not a challenge for someone with potions talent at fifteen. Plants, their properties, their relationships to the potions they'd become — it was simply the same subject viewed from a different angle. He and Hermione raced answers again, and Gryffindor accumulated points.
Flying was a disaster.
It had always been going to be a disaster. Flight Talent: 1. He'd known it going in. He had simply hoped that knowing might somehow make it less true.
It did not.
Madam Hooch stood them in lines on the cold October lawn, brooms to the left, and called Up! Harry's jumped to his hand immediately — natural, effortless, the instinct of a born Seeker. Several others came more slowly. Neville's twitched.
Kevin's did nothing.
He stared at it. Up. Nothing. The broom sat on the grass like a particularly unambitious stick.
He kicked it.
"Mr. Kevin." Hooch's voice cut across the lawn. "Your broom is not a football."
She made him pick it up by hand, which he did, and arranged him at the end of the line beside Neville, both of them holding their brooms with the resigned air of people who had been issued the wrong tool for the job.
Then Neville's broom launched itself without warning.
Kevin's did the same.
He was ready for it in the sense that he had very good reflexes and fifteen points of constitution, so he was able to lock his knees and hang on with both hands when the broom bucked and yawed. What he was not able to do was fly it. The broom had momentum and absolutely no interest in his steering attempts — he tilted the handle, it went sideways; he leaned back, it pitched; he tried to think calming thoughts at it, which the broom ignored entirely.
He was probably six metres up when the broom inverted.
His grip failed. He let go rather than fight it.
He twisted in the air — the body knowing what to do even when the brain was still catching up — and landed in a crouch on the grass, hard enough to feel it in his knees but without falling.
Several of the watching students made a sound somewhere between gasp and cheer.
Neville, Kevin thought, straightening up and looking skyward.
Neville was twenty metres up and climbing, the broom having fully escaped Hooch's control and apparently decided to investigate the castle's upper parapets. His face was white. His eyes were enormous. He was holding on with both arms and both legs and making a sound that didn't quite form into words.
"Mr. Longbottom! Tilt the front of the broom downward — lean forward gently — "
The broom clipped a decorative stone protrusion on the east tower at roughly twenty-five metres. The impact caught Neville's robes and hooked him, briefly, before the fabric tore.
Kevin was already moving.
He was under the fall line before Neville was free of the stone, and when Neville dropped he came down into Kevin's arms with a solidity that drove Kevin's heels into the grass. Constitution fifteen. He held.
He stood there for a moment, Neville cradled across both arms, staring upward at the tower.
The lawn was completely silent.
Neville, eyes shut, gradually became aware that he was not dead, and opened one eye.
"You're all right," Kevin said. "I've got you."
Neville opened the other eye.
Hooch arrived at a near-run. "Mr. Kevin — Mr. Longbottom — " She looked at them, then at the tower, then back at Kevin with an expression that had moved through relief and was now heading toward alarm. "That was extraordinarily reckless. You could have misjudged the fall line. You could have been seriously hurt."
"I'm sorry, Madam Hooch." Kevin set Neville carefully upright. "I moved before I thought about it."
"I'm taking Mr. Longbottom to the hospital wing. Nobody flies." She pointed at the assembled class with a finger that brooked no argument. "Anyone I catch in the air while I'm gone is banned from this pitch for the remainder of the year."
She led Neville away. Kevin became aware, gradually, of a large number of people looking at him.
Draco Malfoy, at the far end of the line, was turning something small and glass-like over in his hands with an expression that had curdled from surprise into something petty and performative. He'd palmed Neville's Remembrall from the grass when the broom had bucked Neville free of the group.
"Potter," Draco called, his composure recovering. "Come and take it back, if you want it."
He stepped onto his broom and rose without hesitation — smooth, confident, irritating.
"Of course," he added, levelling a look at Kevin that clearly wanted to be contemptuous but had a slight wobble in it, "muscle's not much use when you can't get off the ground."
A pebble passed his left ear at high speed.
Draco flinched. The broom wobbled. He grabbed the handle with both hands, looking down at Kevin, who was bouncing a second pebble thoughtfully in his palm.
"I have quite good aim," Kevin said pleasantly. "And a reasonably unlimited supply of gravel."
Draco looked at him. Kevin smiled. Draco's jaw tightened.
Kevin turned to Harry. "Go. You've been staring at that broom for thirty seconds and you already know what to do."
Harry nodded. He mounted his broom and rose, and the moment he was in the air something changed in him — the uncertainty fell away and what was underneath it was instinct, pure and simple. He chased the Remembrall across the sky.
Draco, furious at being thoroughly outmanoeuvred on the ground and now watching the spectacle of Harry Potter flying like he'd been born to it, hurled the Remembrall at the castle wall in a rage.
Harry caught it.
From the first-floor window, Professor McGonagall watched this sequence of events with an expression that was difficult to interpret.
Kevin put his arm around Draco's shoulders as Harry landed to the cheers of the entire class, and leaned in close. Draco went rigid.
Whatever Kevin said, he said it quietly enough that nobody else heard it. Draco's face went through three distinct colours. When Kevin stepped back, Draco straightened his robes with hands that weren't quite steady and said nothing at all.
Kevin didn't dislike Draco. He'd read the story — knew what Draco was being shaped into, knew how much of it was his own choice and how much was the weight of a family that had been training him for a particular destiny since before he could form a full sentence. The arrogance was real, but underneath it was something that could, in the right conditions, become something better.
First step: establish that the current approach had consequences.
McGonagall swept across the lawn toward Harry with the expression of a woman with urgent business, and Kevin watched Hermione watching both of them with a look on her face that suggested she had decided the entire male half of Gryffindor was going to be her problem for the foreseeable future.
She wasn't wrong.