"Hermione. Have you seen Kevin? He's been gone two days."
Harry and Ron had found her in the library.
"Didn't he tell you?"
"Tell us what?"
"He's been out with Snape. Setting up his own potion supply network — ingredient sourcing, distribution contacts." She looked faintly pleased. "In Kevin's words: done being someone else's employee."
Harry and Ron exchanged a look. Both of them arrived at the same conclusion: that they had, apparently, become the less informed members of the group. This was mildly galling.
Most quality potion ingredients were controlled by old wizarding families with herb gardens and breeding stock going back centuries. They supplied shops at their preferred prices, through their preferred channels, on their preferred timelines.
The genuinely rare materials required specialist hunters who mostly operated through informal channels — which meant contacts, which meant knowing the right people in places that didn't officially exist.
Two days with Snape had given Kevin a crash course in the shape of that economy.
The Room of Requirement had served him well for brewing. It would serve him a few more years. After that, he needed something permanent — a proper workshop, a proper licence, distribution channels that were actually his and no one else's.
He'd ask Dumbledore about a space. The headmaster owed him at minimum a decent room.
He walked behind Snape down a Knockturn Alley side-street that appeared on no tourist map, watching the older wizard navigate it with the ease of someone who had been doing this for decades, and thought: This is the last lesson. After this, I stop working inside someone else's operation and start running my own.
He filed the thought away for later.
He got back to Hogwarts that evening and went to find Hermione. The library. Of course.
She was in the back section with an Advanced Runes text the size of a small building. She looked up when he arrived, face brightening before she remembered to look scholarly about it.
He slid into the chair beside her without a word. She moved her notes to make room. They worked together until Madam Pince started making pointed eye contact at the approaching curfew.
In the corridor outside, Hermione said, "How did it go?"
"Well." He reached into his bag and produced a small keychain — a silver cat, neat and simple. "I saw it and thought of you."
She took it and turned it over in her fingers. She didn't say anything immediately, which meant she liked it more than she intended to show.
They walked back, her shoulder against his arm.
"Trelawney gave Harry another bad luck prophecy today," she said. "Something about a short-lived fate."
"She's working with good data," Kevin said. "Something always happens."
"You're part of why something always happens," Hermione said.
"I'm the solution, not the problem."
She laughed. "Sirius sent Harry a Firebolt. Best broom available. Harry was doing laps around the building and McGonagall took ten points before he'd been on it twenty minutes."
"She's consistent, at least."
They came into the common room to find Harry and Ginny by the fireplace, deep in something that had been going for a while. Firelight on both faces. Neither of them had heard the door.
Kevin stopped. Looked at Hermione. She looked at him. He raised his eyebrows. She shook her head, which didn't actually stop him.
"Good evening," Kevin said.
Harry was on his feet in one motion, three different kinds of flustered. "Kevin! You're back — I've been — Ron and I —"
"Harry," Kevin said. "We're going to bed."
He steered Hermione toward the staircase, giving Harry a single thumbs-up over his shoulder.
Harry watched them go.
"Was that...?" Ginny asked.
"That was Kevin," Harry confirmed, sitting back down.
"Does he do that often?"
"Constantly."
Finals ran their course. Harry lost marks in Potions that had very little to do with his performance and everything to do with Snape maintaining a principle he'd held since Harry's first day. Kevin had warned him. He'd studied anyway and lost the points anyway.
Ron, who had been drilling with Kevin's methods long enough for them to have become instinct, sat the examinations with the focused calm of someone who had done the preparation and trusted it.
Hermione sat each one like a Seeker who had already spotted the Snitch.
The train south was sun-warm and loud. Kevin slept most of it against Hermione's shoulder while she read, his breathing long and even, entirely unbothered.