Magical Hogwarts

Working for Cropton had paid off more than he ever expected it to. Officially, he’d found himself promoted from errand boy to a proper apprentice, keeping the shelves stocked no longer by a flick of his wand, but through long hours of brewing and mulling. The basic lessons were as boring as an Astronomy class, but as horrified as he was to admit it, Kay was actually learning from the old git. The cocksure attitude he’d swaggered into the store with had given way to humility after a few initial fuck-ups had forced him to listen or risk the loss of his job.

Creating original potions seemed an easy feat. How hard was it to memorize the purposes of different ingredients and throw them all together in a pot? Treating the process like some sort of art sounded like bughouse territory. But Kay had combined quite a few elements only to end up with fuck all. His worst experiment pissed Cropton off so bad, the geezer had made him mop floors like a muggle for weeks. Rod still wasn’t letting him live it down. Attempting a pick-me-up potion, an upper like Felix without the good fortune, Kay had bunted a few of the key components in a cauldron and let them simmer together like a roast. And roasted they had. The potion smelt like absolute shite, the fetid scent enough to put even the rats off. The store gave off a noxious smell for weeks.

Kay had still tried the potion, partially out of morbid curiosity, partially because he now needed a mood-elevator after Cropton’s tirade, but all he’d ended up with was lingering nausea. Cropton had concocted a remedy after threatening to skin Kay alive if he got any upchuck on the floor (fuck him, the wood was practically rotting without Kay’s help) and begun explaining why he was boring Kay and wasting hours of his life with all of his elementary lessons. Relearning the fundamentals and drawing an understanding of why some ingredients took a specific amount time to brew, or had to be chopped a certain way, or could only be added after another item, was important, apparently. Eventually, Kay understood that Cropton was more than just a coot.

Mastering the essentials had led to more success with his own potions. More success with his own potions had led to him trying all sorts of outlandish ideas. Kay’s Slytherin ambition had started moving to the forefront. He hadn’t let go of the lesser Felix alternative, either. It was what he’d been working on for the past week, and he had the perfect candidate to test it out. Who better to take an upper than his downer of a little brother? Merlin knew Lionel needed it. Kay wondered if the little freak had been quietly invading his subconscious while he worked on it. Nevermind, it was done, and it didn’t smell like it would kill Lionel after he drank it, which Kay thought was a good sign. The colour was a dull ochre, not the most appetizing, but far more appealing than the murky brown of his first attempt. Kay corked the liquid and kept it in a tight grip as he apparated to Lionel’s. He banged on the door and the moment it cracked, he shoved his way in.

“Drink this.” It was never as easy as shoving the vial into Lionel’s hands and directing, but Kay insisted on trying every time. One day was bound to be an off one, and that was all he needed.

april 2005

It was true that his desk was covered in parchment, but one look at its compulsively gridded nature and it was difficult not to concede Lionel's point that there was an order to the chaos. A miniature star blazed in the center of the darkened room, its light diffracting through a grating onto a suspended clear glass vial, filled with a potion that fixed and re-emitted its spectrum, illuminating the carefully reproduced manuscripts on the desk below in dim rainbow light. Lionel plucked the vial out of the air and arrayed it next to a series of others on a nearby shelf.

He frowned as he tapped the star with his wand, which shrank and turned cool and red, next in the standard cycle of representative spectral classifications that came with the device. The glowing spectra, which sloshed pleasantly when shaken, were both nice to look at and accurate; they could even be compared visually, when still; but quantifying them was still tedious, and there were days when it seemed the gap between experiment and theory was larger with magical aid. Magic reduced the technical burden of observation - reduced the precision necessary in device manufacturing to a trivial flick of the wand, allowed for detection tricks like this. Yet even the theory of classical mechanics required calculus that Lionel had had to teach himself, in his spare time, over the past few years: walking stiffly into Muggle London, feeling very exposed in shirt and trousers, in order to steal otherwise shockingly expensive undergraduate textbooks.

And that merely got him into the 19th century. The papers arrayed on the desk were all at least a hundred years old. He'd tried, once, to look at an issue of a modern journal after sneaking into the University College London science library, and had quickly given up on that idea; the technological divergence was too great. The old papers were tractable because they gave insight into how the tools and theories had been developed; Lionel scanned for inspiration on constructing their magic-enhanced superiors. Lionel knew that they (wizards, and he, Lionel) could do better, held secrets of the universe that Muggles could never access, the missing pieces they would always overlook, but swimming against their temporal and numerical advantages could be maddening. Maybe Waldrick's weird extracurricular's ringleader or whatever had a point. One.

He transferred another dram of potion into a new vial and began to levitate it into position when a furious banging broke his concentration. He swore as it shattered, the potion spraying across his carpet and taking on its drab brown before soaking in. Lionel pinched his nose and then sighed deeply. Kay - the only person who both knew where he lived and was this noisy - didn't know how to take no for an answer, so there would be no relief from the banging unless he acknowledged his brother.

Kay shoved his way in as soon as Lionel turned the knob, presenting him with a vial of liquid that, as he held it up skeptically to the ruddy starlight, gleamed the color of clay. "No," he said irritably, and gestured towards the floor. "Fix my vial, I needed that." He squinted again at the potion. "What is this supposed to be? Cropton doesn't sell this." Lionel had seen more potions than he cared to think about in the last eight months and had a good idea of the standard commercial offerings.