The morning edition of Wizarding Weekly arrived at breakfast with headlines that Kevin read while his fork was still halfway to his mouth.
SHOCK: Hogwarts' youngest assistant professor abuses his position to harass young witch in private office! Why would an ordinary-looking nobody snag the attention of the school's top champion? Did she dose him?
He turned the pages with detached interest.
The first story — the harassment in the office angle — was, he would admit privately, drawing on a real sequence of events arranged in a creative order. Things had occurred in his workshop. He had been messing with Hermione. Nobody had been harassed. The distinction mattered.
The love potion story was another matter entirely. The suggestion that someone had successfully dosed a provisional Potions Master — a person who had brewed Amortentia's base compounds from memory for a third-year lesson and could identify the scent in under five seconds — was a claim that should come with evidence. It didn't.
The more interesting problem was the sourcing. Some of those quotes were accurate to within a word. His office had a Muffliato charm. Eighth floor, no accessible ledge. No visitor unaccounted for.
He was working through the viable routes when Hermione's expression sharpened into the look she got when something had clicked.
Animagus. She'd worked it out.
He caught her eye and touched one finger to his lips. She blinked.
He gave the smallest nod. She folded the magazine, rearranged her expression, and said nothing.
Harry looked between them with open confusion. "Should we push back on this? It could affect your TA position, Kevin."
"Responding gives it legs." Kevin turned a page. "Anyone who knows us already knows the first story is fabricated. The love potion story — make her prove it."
"You're very calm," Ron said.
"Someone wrote fiction about me. I should probably be flattered."
Hermione's jaw was tight. She was considerably less calm than Kevin and choosing not to show it, which he recognised and appreciated.
"Swing by my workshop after classes," he said to her, easy and offhand. "Got something to run by you."
She caught the glint in his eye. She nodded.
Kevin's second-year afternoon session was buzzing before he'd opened the door. He walked in to twenty-four students wearing the particular guilty energy of people who'd been talking about something they'd now have to stop talking about.
He set his bag on the desk.
"Today's topic is love potions."
Silence.
"Who can tell me what one does?"
A hand went up immediately. Astoria Greengrass, second row — composed, keeping up with the curriculum, and well-briefed from her conversations with Draco on exactly how absurd the story in question was.
"A love potion makes the drinker fixate on whoever gave it to them," she said.
"Close. What it doesn't do is create love. It creates obsession — a compulsive, artificial infatuation that overrides rational thought. The emotion isn't there. Just the fixation." Kevin moved to the board. "Standard duration: roughly twenty-four hours for a fresh brew, longer for an aged one. The scent is unique to each person — it smells like whatever the drinker finds most compelling. Cognitive effects are significant. Prolonged use causes psychological deterioration."
He turned back to the room.
"The practical question: if a qualified brewer drinks a love potion administered by someone else, how quickly do you think they recognise what's happened?"
A few beats of quiet.
"Thirty seconds?" someone offered.
"Roughly. Cognitive impairment registers first, then recognition follows from the compound's scent and effects. The brewer identifies it almost immediately. At that point it's a matter of brewing the antidote from memory — takes about three minutes with a portable kit. Any brewer worth their licence carries antidote components." He set the chalk down. "This is week-two material. Questions on the actual curriculum?"
Hands went up. The room had deflated into something closer to sheepishness. A persistent Slytherin in the third row raised his hand last.
"So the first story was real?"
Kevin paused one beat. "Potions questions only in Potions class."
The room went up. No one believed actual harassment had occurred — the consensus had already settled on something more like couple behaviour — but the love potion angle was visibly dead.
Kevin folded his arms and waited for them to settle, wearing an expression of mild patience that several students would later describe as deeply incriminating.