The Slug Club dinner was not, in Kevin's immediate schedule, the priority.
Slughorn's invitation to Harry had arrived on a Saturday, which meant Kevin's afternoon was free. He was in his workshop reading through Snape's note when the letter arrived.
He read it twice.
Collect ten portions of Acromantula brain marrow. Deliver to my workshop before nightfall. Experiment tonight — the Occlumency Draught requires refinement. Your assistance is required. — Snape
Kevin folded the note and put it in his pocket.
Ten portions was a standard research quantity. The Acromantula colony in the Forbidden Forest was, by any reasonable ecological metric, significantly over its carrying capacity — they'd been expanding since the last time Kevin had spent a training season culling the population. Snape's timing was convenient. And the Occlumency Draught work was genuinely interesting.
He also wanted to talk to Snape about the Killing Curse mechanics, when the moment was right. Not in a way that could be overheard.
He took his crowbar and went into the forest.
The deep forest had its own quality of sound — the way all the small noises of the castle and the grounds dropped away and were replaced by something older and less interested in human concerns. Kevin moved through it with the ease of long familiarity.
He was halfway to his intended hunting ground when the sound reached him through the undergrowth: two voices, one human and one distinctly not.
He came around the root of a massive beech and found Hagrid kneeling on the ground beside the largest Acromantula Kevin had ever seen.
Aragog.
The spider's eight eyes had gone the flat, dull grey of something approaching its end. One foreleg moved against Hagrid's arm with the slowness of exhaustion. Hagrid sat with his face arranged in the particular way of someone who has accepted a hard thing but not made peace with it.
"Old friend," came the rasping voice from the massive mandibles, "my time has come."
"Aragog. You're tough as anything. A few more years yet—"
"Heh." A soft, broken sound. "If only."
Kevin was silent.
He could leave. Come back. Get his ten portions from the outer colony without disturbing this. It was the reasonable, polite thing to do.
A young Acromantula dropped from the branches overhead and hit the ground five feet to his left.
He looked at it.
It looked at him.
There was a brief pause.
He hit it with the crowbar.
Hagrid's head came up. Aragog went very still.
"Kevin?" Hagrid looked between the dropped spider and the crowbar and Kevin's face. "What in the — you promised!"
"I promised not to randomly cull the colony," Kevin said. "This one was actively above my head."
"That's—" Hagrid struggled. "That's just how they move!"
"Uncle Hagrid. I came to collect research samples. On my way in, I passed the centaur camp. There were Acromantulas in the outer rim of their territory — at least thirty of them. The centaurs weren't happy." He kept his voice matter-of-fact. "The colony isn't just large, it's expanding into contested ground. That creates a different kind of problem."
Hagrid was quiet.
"I'll take what I need from the outer fringe and leave the core alone," Kevin said. "That's as much as I can promise."
He looked at Aragog. The ancient spider's eyes had moved to him — slowly, with the effort of something operating on very limited reserves.
Those eyes held something that was not quite fear and not quite calculation. Something that had lived a very long time and knew exactly what it was looking at.
"Your colony does need management," Kevin said, speaking to Aragog directly now. "Not slaughter. Management. Unchecked growth means territory conflicts, and territory conflicts bring in parties that won't negotiate."
Hagrid looked anguished. "Kevin—"
"I'm leaving," Kevin said. "I've got what I need from the edge. I'm not touching anything in the inner range."
He retrieved the research samples he'd collected on the way in — they were already done, the outer-range spiders having been incautious about their proximity to someone carrying a crowbar — and headed back toward the castle.
Behind him, the forest settled back into its sounds.
And Aragog, who had been preparing for death with the slow acceptance of a creature that had lived a hundred years, found something moving in his chest that was not quite hope but was in the vicinity of it.
If I am gone, he thought, there is no treaty. No negotiation. Only that crowbar.
He had Hagrid's love and Hagrid's loyalty and Hagrid's protection. He had always had that. But Hagrid could not manage the colony alone. He never had been able to.
"Old friend," Aragog said slowly. "I think... I may have a few more days in me yet."
Hagrid lit up. He reached out, hand moving gently across the great spider's thorax.
"Aragog! That's wonderful!"
It wasn't hope, exactly. It was pragmatism dressed in hope's clothing. But Aragog had lived long enough to know that sometimes the distinction didn't matter.
Kevin delivered the brain marrow samples to Snape's workshop as the last light left the sky.
Snape was already at his workbench, setting up with the focused efficiency of a man who has been thinking about this experiment since the morning. The table was covered: vials, burners, weighing scales, a rack of Acromantula-derived compounds at one end, and at the other, something Kevin hadn't expected — several small phials of memory-thread material, shimmering faintly in the torchlight.
Kevin set the samples down and looked at the setup with professional interest.
"The memory threads are for depth calibration?" he asked.
Snape looked up. His expression was the standard one — professionally unenthusiastic about everything — but his hands had paused, which meant he was actually considering the question.
"The Occlumency Draught's current limitation is duration," Snape said. "A day. Two at most. The memory material is a test medium. I want to know whether integration at the brewing stage extends the effect or destabilises the compound."
"The brain marrow as a structural binder," Kevin said, pulling up a stool. "Running the memory-thread properties through a physical anchor."
Snape gave him the look he reserved for correct answers delivered without sufficient deference.
"Get your apron," he said.
Kevin got his apron.
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