The holidays were burning down fast. More than half gone already, with just one week left before they were due at the Order of the Phoenix.
Kevin had been spending most of that time in the basement.
Attempt number five.
A loose cluster of silvery sand floated at eye level, held steady by a levitation charm. Kevin uncorked the preparation potion he'd brewed the night before — a brownish-yellow liquid that shot out in a perfect membrane, a bubble that swallowed the sand completely.
He touched his wand to it. Gold light sparked from the tip.
Inside the bubble, the grains began to move. They pulled toward each other, compacting, finding a shape — a diamond about two fingers wide. As it formed, the diamond went porous, drinking in the liquid around it the way dry earth drinks rain.
The potion vanished. What was left was a small solid diamond of silver, dense and smooth.
Kevin pressed more gold light into it. On the table beside him, a blue crystal lifted and floated toward the diamond. When it touched the surface, the solid went briefly soft — just long enough to accept the crystal, drawing it inward like a bead of water absorbed into cloth.
Then the gold light drove home. Kevin pushed it in, threading it deep.
The diamond began to shake.
Its surface rippled, the outer grains pulling loose. He'd seen this before — the feedback loop, the unstable binding about to break apart. He moved before the thought finished forming.
Gold light again, faster, weaving out of his wand in fine threads that wrapped the diamond from every angle and held it together by force of will alone. The shaking built, peaked — and then, slowly, subsided.
The surface wasn't perfectly smooth. A few grains had escaped the binding, leaving small bumps. But the crystal was seated, the structure was whole, and when Kevin pressed his palm against it and pushed a thread of magic inward, the diamond lit up.
Softly at first. Brighter as he fed it more.
He pulled the magic back. The light dimmed. The energy returned to him — about seventy percent of what he'd put in. The rest had bled out through the surface flaws.
He turned it over in his palm.
A magical energy storage crystal. Imperfect. Lossy. Degraded with each use and would eventually fail entirely. But it held approximately a tenth of his total magical capacity, and it charged and discharged on command.
He thought about the structural flaws. Thought about overloading a degraded crystal past its tolerance threshold, the kind of cascading failure that might be rather spectacular at close range.
Possible future use, he noted mentally, and shelved it.
He climbed the basement stairs into the living room. Hermione was on the sofa with a book, and she put it down the second she saw his face.
"Did it work?"
He crossed the room and sat beside her, opening his palm. The diamond crystal caught the light — a small, faint glow pulsing in its core.
"A few flaws. But yes."
She picked it up immediately, turned it over, and sent a cautious thread of magic into it. Felt it draw the energy in, felt the resistance and the yield of it. Her eyes went wide.
"Kevin, this is extraordinary. Just a mineral crystal — and it stores magic. The wizarding world has nothing like this."
She threw her arms around him, and Kevin hummed contentedly and let her.
"I'm calling it an energy storage crystal," he said into her hair. "Keep it if you want — let me know if anything goes wrong. Don't overfill it."
She pulled back just enough to look at him, still holding the crystal, delighted in a way she usually only got about books.
The front door opened.
Mrs. Granger stepped in, read the situation in about a quarter of a second, and her face broke into a knowing smile. "Oh dear. Am I interrupting~?"
Hermione shoved Kevin's arm off and sat up very straight, her face immediately crimson. "Mum! We agreed — ring the bell when you come over!"
"I know, I know. You're practically adults now, you need your privacy~"
She was laughing behind her hand, entirely unrepentant.
Kevin made a mental note to start locking the door. He didn't mind Mrs. Granger at all — she was easy company. But the timing was its own special punishment.
"Alright, I'll stop teasing. Kevin, do you mind terribly if I steal my precious daughter for a bit?"
She winked at him.
"Mum! You can't just—"
"Take good care of my precious girlfriend," Kevin said pleasantly.
Hermione's blush deepened past crimson into something approaching scarlet. She gave up on all of it, kicked Kevin's shin with no real heat, grabbed her mother's arm, and marched her back next door.
Kevin leaned back on the sofa with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose afternoon had gone very well.
Mrs. Granger had been doing this lately — calling Hermione over for what she described to Kevin, with a conspiratorial smirk, as wife training sessions. What exactly was covered in those sessions Kevin couldn't be sure. He suspected it involved cooking and household spells in some ratio to advice of a more personal nature.
What he did know was that Hermione had recently developed several new habits — coming to find him when he'd been reading too long, appearing with a shoulder rub when he looked tired, curling into his side with some creative pretext when he seemed like he needed company — that he had absolutely no complaints about.
He picked up her book, checked where she'd left off, and sat there reading it until she came back.
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