Kevin ran the numbers fast.
The Gaze of Death wasn't going to kill him outright — bad luck didn't work that way. It wasn't a death sentence. It was a variable. A thumb on the scale at the worst possible moments. Lose his footing mid-duel. Have his Apparition go slightly wrong at a crucial second. Have a spell flicker when it should have landed clean.
He'd need to stay in combat mode as much as possible. The debuff cancelled in active combat, which explained why nothing had gone wrong in the graveyard.
He crossed to Ron. "Duel me."
Ron looked at him like he'd grown a second head. "What? Right now? We just got back from—"
"Duel me."
Ron shrugged and squared up.
Kevin filled in the group afterward, keeping the Voldemort explanation simple — a curse, residual dark magic, nothing fatal, disrupted by active spellcasting. Hermione looked at him the way she always looked at him when she suspected he was leaving out at least forty percent of the relevant information.
She was usually right.
He assigned the extra ten attribute points to Constitution. Forty across the board — magic and body finally matched. It felt right. Solid.
He left the Death situation alone after that. No point obsessing over it.
What mattered was the Order.
The story of Barty Crouch Jr. came out fully over the following days, as Dumbledore assembled the pieces from his interrogation and shared them with the people who needed to know.
Old Barty had been a well-regarded Ministry man once. A hard-liner on Dark wizard prosecution — personally overseeing the life imprisonment of several Death Eaters after Voldemort's first fall. Respected. Decorated, even.
Then his wife had gotten sick and his son had been arrested and the man who had sentenced dozens of people to Azkaban without visible remorse had stood at his own son's trial and voted to convict him and gone home and presumably lived with that for about three weeks before his wife started begging.
The switch in Azkaban. The years of imprisonment in his own home. The careful, fragile structure of the Imperius Curse, which required constant maintenance and cracked under the weight of a Quidditch World Cup and one night of crowds and noise and the peculiar sensory overload of being nearly human again.
Barty Jr. had lasted maybe twenty minutes of freedom before he'd done the one visible, dramatic thing he knew how to do — the Dark Mark blazing into a sky full of witnesses — and made everything worse.
His father had spent the rest of his life trying to contain the damage. He'd almost made it to Dumbledore. Almost.
Now both of them were dead, and the Ministry had made sure there'd be no trial and no record, and Fudge was in his office looking at a long editorial in the Daily Prophet calling the whole Triwizard Tournament a security failure and calling for his resignation.
He responded by commissioning a counter-piece in the same paper calling Dumbledore a dangerous megalomaniac and Kevin a troubled, attention-seeking teenager who had fabricated the resurrection story with Dumbledore's encouragement.
Kevin read it over breakfast and went back to his workshop to write a response for Rita.
Rita Skeeter had received Kevin's letter before the Ministry's censors could arrange anything. The story ran the morning after the Tournament: two witnesses, one of them under Veritaserum, confirming they had personally observed Voldemort's resurrection. Rita's byline. The full account of the graveyard.
The Ministry killed the follow-up edition within twenty-four hours and ran their own version.
But the first article existed. It had been read. Copies were already circulating. Some people were already choosing what they believed.
Others were furiously not choosing, which amounted to the same thing.
Kevin noted the outcome and moved on. He'd done what he could from this end. The rest was politics, and politics moved at its own speed regardless of what he pushed.
The last night before the school year ended, Kevin sat in his workshop with an alchemy textbook open on the table and his head in his hands.
Alchemy, it turned out, was not like any other subject. It was all the other subjects fused together and set on fire. Potions, Charms, Transfiguration, Herbology, a working knowledge of magical theory at a graduate level — all of it fed into alchemy the way tributaries fed a river.
His talent score was twelve points. It was not enough.
He dumped the five spare talent points into it anyway, bringing it to seventeen. Better. Still nowhere near where it needed to be to produce what he actually wanted.
He needed a teacher.
Dumbledore was the obvious candidate. Kevin put it on the list for next term.
He was still at the table at three in the morning when knuckles tapped at his door.
"Kevin." Hermione's voice, thick with sleep. "Why is your light still on?"
He'd lost track of the time entirely.
He opened the door. She stood in the corridor in her nightgown, hair loose, blinking at him with the particular expression she reserved for moments when he'd been quietly frustrating her without being present to notice.
"Reading."
"What are you reading?"
"Alchemy."
Her eyes sharpened immediately. "Those are the books we bought together! We were supposed to study those as a pair! You went off alone!"
Kevin weighed his options. "I've only done the basics."
"It's three in the morning, Kevin."
"...Time got away from me."
She stared at him until he felt genuinely contrite, which took about four seconds with Hermione.
"Bed. Now," she said, and her tone left no room for negotiation.
He closed the book. She turned to go back to her room.
That was when a knock echoed through the castle — Dumbledore and Snape, arriving to discuss TA arrangements for next year. Kevin met them at the door while Hermione retreated upstairs.
Snape delivered his terms with characteristic economy: first through fourth years, Kevin's responsibility, effective next term. Pick your own texts. Sort your own lesson plans. "Leave me out of it."
He left without waiting for a response.
Dumbledore lingered, poked around the workshop with the unabashed curiosity of a man who had decades of practice making nosiness look charming, admired the tea set, promised to bring his record player, and departed looking pleased about all of it.
Kevin locked the workshop, extinguished the lights, and climbed the stairs.
He hadn't sorted out the Gaze of Death. He hadn't cracked alchemy. He hadn't figured out the full shape of what was coming. But the Order was reforming, the year was over, and tomorrow he was going home.
That was enough for tonight.
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