Potions that week were a Forgetfulness Potion, and Snape's board carried its usual deviation from Jigger's method— the standard-size sprig of valerian swapped for a smaller measure, added a full minute earlier in the process than the textbook called for.
Aegeus read the board, then his textbook, then the board again. He didn't raise his hand. He understood it before Snape had even finished writing the last line— the Snape addition let the valerian's oils infuse more gradually, avoiding the over-extraction of Jigger's method, and the reduced quantity was compensated for by adding a little more.
It had the double effect of reducing the time and slightly improving the taste. In exchange, the process had become much more demanding, with far less margin for error.
It was exactly the same way he had learned to expect by now: trade a little of the book's caution for something faster, something better, provided you understood exactly what you were trading. He copied the sequence down without comment and got to work.
Snape noticed. Midway through the lesson, moving between the rows checking cauldrons, he stopped at Aegeus's station longer than the potion strictly required.
"No interruption today, Mr. Granger?" Snape said, his tone dry enough to cut. "Did you finally realize your own incompetence, or do you think you already know everything there is to know about potions?"
"Neither, sir. But I do happen to know why you changed the potion this time."
"Then please do enlighten me," said Snape slowly, his voice low.
"The new method allows the valerian oil to infuse more gradually," Aegeus said, without pause, "Doing so prevents it from over-extracting, which creates the bitter taste that Jigger's version is infamous for."
Something flickered behind Snape's eyes, gone before it could be perceived as anything as generous as approval.
"It seems you're not entirely hopeless, Mr. Granger." He held Aegeus's gaze a moment longer, with the same indifference, then moved on down the row without another word, no points deducted or rewarded, nothing that could resemble praise.
"Hooray!" Marcus cheered the moment they stepped into the corridor, sounding genuinely thrilled. "No points deducted today. Maybe we'll actually win the House cup this year."
"Don't get used to it," Aegeus said. "Figuring it out today doesn't mean I'll figure it out next time."
"I'm allowed to enjoy it while it lasts!"
Rosalind said nothing, just gave Aegeus a brief, appraising look before the three of them turned down the corridor toward the Great Hall, Marcus already several steps ahead, muttering something about how long it had been since breakfast.
~~~
Living With Legilimens: Choose Your Minds Wisely sat open in the same place where he had left it last time. He settled in for what had become a familiar routine— focus a single word, compress it, hold it at the front of his mind against the low, constant static of every other thought trying to find their way outside.
He'd started with simple words, back in the first week. Yes.Wait.No.
Single-syllable words that were easier to isolate. By the second week he'd moved to short phrases, testing how much complexity the technique could carry before it started leaking at the edges— a small crack, and suddenly he'd be thinking about three other things at once, the compressed thought diluted back into ordinary noise.
Tonight he ran the exercise against the clock, timing himself with the small pocket watch he'd borrowed indefinitely from Marcus's collection of things he claimed to need and never used. Four seconds to compress. Eleven seconds held, steady, before the first stray thought — something about Sprout's bubotubers, entirely unrelated— tried to muscle its way in, and he had to start over.
The book itself only ever described the exercise as clearing the mind, a single, generic instruction with no real structure behind it. The timing was his own addition, a way of turning a vague piece of advice into something he could actually measure progress against.
It made him a stranger kind of tired than dueling drills left him. Vance's sessions ached in his shoulders and legs. This ached somewhere inside.
He closed the book a few minutes before curfew, marked his page, and sat a moment longer in the quiet, running the compression one final time. One.
~~~
He tried it for the first time on the walk back from the library, three days after he'd first managed to hold a compressed thought past the fifteen-second mark. And the corridor was full of exactly the kind of passing traffic he needed to test this on.
He knew, deep down, that testing this on unsuspecting students sat somewhere he wasn't entirely comfortable with.
He told himself, not entirely convincingly, that the book's own theory made this less invasive than it sounded— he wasn't browsing anyone's memories, couldn't have if he'd tried, wasn't skilled enough to force entry past even the thinnest unintentional barrier.
All he could catch, if the technique worked at all, was whatever sat loudest and closest to the surface: the single sharpest thing a person happened to be feeling in the exact second he looked. He decided that was a thin enough justification to proceed on, and cast the discomfort away.
A second-year Hufflepuff passed him first, hurrying toward the stairs with an armful of books threatening to slide loose. Aegeus held her in his peripheral vision for the half-second it took to make the attempt.
Legilimens
He caught something faint and formless, something that resolved into dread rather than any clearer form— homework, probably, or a parent's letter she hadn't opened yet. It was gone before he could process it into anything more specific.
A pair of fifth-years next, deep in conversation and paying him no attention at all, gave him nothing usable— their surface thoughts, whatever they were, buried under the noise of their own conversation, exactly the kind of interference the book had warned would drown out anything fainter than genuine distress.
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TO BE CONTINUED
~~~
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