The feast had barely been underway for ten minutes before Harry leaned over to Percy and nodded toward the staff table.
"Percy — who's that? Next to Professor Quirrell?"
Percy followed his gaze. "Professor Snape. Head of Slytherin. He teaches Potions, but everyone knows he's been after the Defence Against the Dark Arts position for years. Obsessed with the subject."
Kevin glanced over at the staff table without much interest. Snape sat with his dark eyes moving slowly across the hall, taking inventory. He looked exactly as Kevin had expected — pale, composed, the particular stillness of someone who noticed everything and showed nothing.
The old bat, Kevin thought, and looked back at his food.
Harry was quiet for a moment. Kevin noticed him rubbing his forehead with two fingers and gave him a sideways look. Harry caught it and shook his head with a small smile. Nothing. Kevin let it go. Harry would bottle things up until he couldn't, and pushing never helped.
The feast peaked when the ghosts arrived — drifting through the stone walls mid-course, trailing cold air and centuries of personality. The hall erupted again, briefly, before settling back into the warm noise of several hundred people eating together.
When it finally wound down, the Gryffindor first-years followed Percy up through the castle. The staircases, Percy explained, moved. They had opinions. Trying to plan a route was largely an exercise in optimism.
Kevin barely heard him. He was watching the portraits.
They watched back. Whispered among themselves. A woman in a blue frame was having an animated disagreement with a man in the one beside her, and both of them paused to look at Kevin as he passed.
He slowed. Stopped entirely.
"Kevin." Hermione's voice, several steps ahead. She'd turned around and was watching him with the resigned expression of someone who had been the person walking ahead when the interesting thing happened. "Come on. Keep up."
He caught up. But he filed the portraits away for later.
The Fat Lady's portrait swung open on Percy's password — Dragon Scum, delivered with the slight embarrassment of a prefect who hadn't chosen it — and the first-years filed through into the Gryffindor common room.
It was warm. A fire burned low in the grate, armchairs and sofas gathered around it, the walls hung with scarlet and gold that glowed in the firelight. Someone had left a chess set mid-game on one of the tables.
Percy gave them the geography — boys' dormitory to the left, girls' to the right, don't mix it up, breakfast at eight — and shooed them upstairs.
Kevin's dormitory held Harry, Ron, Neville, and himself, which was convenient. They already knew each other. Neville set Trevor the toad on the bedside table with the nervous care of someone who suspected the toad was judging him. Ron flung himself onto his bed and immediately started talking about Quidditch. Harry sat on the edge of his mattress and looked around at the stone walls, the four-poster beds, the high window through which a handful of stars were visible, and seemed to be quietly trying to absorb the reality of being here.
Kevin watched him for a moment, then pulled the curtains on his own bed and was asleep in four minutes.
He was up before the sun.
Old habits. The dormitory was silent except for Ron's breathing, which had taken on the rhythmic quality of someone who would not be easily woken. Kevin dressed quietly, slipped out through the common room, navigated the shifting staircases with a patience born of not being in a hurry, and found his way down to a stretch of lawn at the base of the castle.
He started his run.
The grounds were still and grey, the lake flat as glass, the sky beginning to lighten at the eastern edge. Kevin jogged his laps and thought about nothing in particular and felt, in a way that was hard to articulate, entirely at home.
He was mid-press-up sequence when a figure appeared briefly in one of the first-floor corridors above him. A dark shape, pausing at the window. Kevin didn't notice.
Snape noticed Kevin.
He'd been up all night. A particularly delicate reduction in the dungeons had demanded his full attention until three in the morning, and now he was making his way back to his quarters with the slow, deliberate tread of a man running on discipline rather than energy. He glanced out the corridor window out of habit and stopped.
A child was doing press-ups on the lawn. In the dark. In October.
Snape considered this for a long moment, his expression cycling through several things before settling on inscrutably neutral. Then he walked on.
Kevin hauled Harry and Ron out of bed at seven-fifteen by the simple method of pulling their blankets off in one smooth motion.
"Transfiguration's first," he said, over the resulting protests. "Get up."
He deposited them both at the breakfast table with eleven minutes to spare, where Hermione was already eating alone, a textbook propped open against her pumpkin juice, her expression carrying the particular flatness of someone who had expected to be eating alone and had made peace with it.
"Morning," Kevin said, dropping into the seat across from her.
She looked up. "Morning. I thought you'd skip."
"Kevin dragged us," Ron said, dropping into the next seat with the air of someone recovering from a natural disaster.
Kevin poured himself some juice. He'd noticed her expression. He'd noticed it on the train too, and in the compartment, and at the Sorting — the way she moved through spaces like she was used to not quite fitting into them. He didn't say anything about it. Instead he asked her about the Transfiguration reading, because that was what she actually wanted, and watched her face change.
They were twenty minutes into a back-and-forth about the theoretical underpinning of molecular restructuring spells — Kevin drawing on his upgraded intelligence, Hermione drawing on the fact that she had read every single assigned text twice — when Harry and Ron, who had both been listening with increasing incomprehension, silently agreed to simply eat their food and let this happen.
The Transfiguration classroom was about half-full when they arrived, which was fine. What was interesting was the tabby cat sitting on the teacher's desk.
Hermione made a soft sound of delight. "Oh, it's beautiful —"
"Yes," Kevin said, looking at the cat's markings with an expression of careful neutrality. "Very impressive animal."
The cat's eyes creased slightly at the corners. Kevin kept his face straight.
Harry and Ron had already found seats. Kevin sat beside Hermione, who had immediately moved on from admiring the cat to extracting her textbook, her notes, and a second set of notes she had apparently made about her first notes.
"You're very organised," Kevin said.
"I prefer to be prepared." She paused. "Is that strange?"
"No. It's sensible."
She seemed to relax slightly. She'd been carrying something careful in her posture since breakfast — a held-in quality, as though she'd said something wrong recently and was still deciding how to recalibrate. Kevin had a reasonable guess about what it was. He'd seen the way her dormitory-mates had looked at her at the Sorting feast when she'd started listing Hogwarts facts — the polite, glassy tolerance that people wore when they were waiting for someone to stop.
He didn't mention it. He just answered her questions about molecular restructuring theory and let her talk, and when she talked, she was excellent.
The cat dropped off the desk, landed without sound, and became Professor McGonagall between one step and the next.
The class collectively stopped breathing.
"Good morning," she said, with complete composure. "Now that we've established that Transfiguration is not theoretical, let's discuss why it's also dangerous."
She covered the rules in about four sentences — absolute attention, no wand without instruction, anyone messing about goes — and then produced a matchstick in front of each student with a wave of her wand.
"Homework for the week. Turn your match into a silver needle. Highest quality, fastest completion, earns house points." She set down her wand. "I'll cover the underlying principles now. Then you'll try."
Kevin listened. He understood the mechanics — it wasn't unlike what he'd done with the accidental magic, back in the orphanage, except then it had been uncontrolled. This was about direction. About holding the target in your mind with enough specificity that the magic had something to work toward.
Shape. Structure. Material composition. The needle exists. The match is becoming it.
"Wands out," McGonagall said. "Follow what I've shown you."
Kevin gripped his wand. Looked at the match.
He built the needle in his mind — the taper, the eye, the cool metallic weight of it, the way light would catch the silver. He felt the magic gather, warm and responsive, and said quietly: "Transform."
The match glowed once, white-gold, and was a needle.
Thick. Slightly irregular at the tip. But a needle.
"Kevin." Hermione's voice was almost a whisper. "You did it."
McGonagall crossed the room and picked it up between two fingers, turning it in the light. She examined it for a long moment.
"Creditable work. There's imprecision in the gauge, and the tip needs refinement — tighten your visualisation, focus on the whole object rather than letting the magic fill in details at random." She set it back down. "Five points to Gryffindor."
The table around them erupted in muted Gryffindor satisfaction. Kevin kept his expression modest.
"How did you do that?" Hermione asked, the second McGonagall had moved on to assess others.
"I just — held the finished object in my head. Every specific I could think of. The magic does the work once it knows where it's going."
She considered this. Then she raised her wand, looked at her match with a focus that was almost aggressive in its intensity, and said: "Change!"
The match twitched. Shivered. Stayed a match.
She made a small frustrated sound.
"You're trying to force it," Kevin said. "You can't force the magic — you have to let it follow the image. Like you're not making it happen, you're just showing it where to go."
"That's very mystical advice."
"I know. Try anyway."
She tried again. And again. On the fourth attempt, her match became a slim silver rod — not quite needle-shaped, but unambiguously metallic, unambiguously transformed.
Kevin looked at it. "That's a start."
"It's terrible."
"It's better than everyone else in this room except me." He nodded toward the other tables, where not a single match had yet moved.
Hermione looked. Then, carefully, the corner of her mouth lifted.
McGonagall came back by the end of class to find two successful transformations — Kevin's now refined to something genuinely close to perfect, Hermione's resolving into a proper needle shape on her fifth attempt. She awarded a second five points to Gryffindor with the slight warmth of a teacher who has been genuinely pleased.
Kevin packed his things slowly, watching Hermione tuck her needle into her notes like it was a certificate. She wasn't even trying to hide how pleased she was, and he found that — unexpectedly — rather good to see.