Amy was close to tears as she said good-bye to Ethan after they left the Hogwarts Express in London. Ethan wasn’t sure how much of it was just acting and how much was real, but he gave her the benefit of the doubt this time and gave her a warm hug. As he saw Leona just standing by, he included her in the hug.

Amy had pestered him on the whole train ride, saying that she expected him to write her every three days. Three days after bantering her down from writing every day. As he didn’t have his own owl, it required Amy to send a letter on her own every three days, but that was a requirement she was happy to fulfill.

Amy was picked up by her mother and Leona by her grandparents, and both were quite eager to introduce him. Amy’s mother was a lot like her: small, brown-haired, a bit hyperactive, and immediately in love with Ethan. She invited him to visit over the holidays and told him he looked a lot like Amy’s father when he was young.

It made Ethan wonder if that was the reason Amy liked him, but he decided against asking her that. Leona’s grandparents were a lot more relaxed but also super friendly with him. Apparently Leona had also mentioned him a lot in her letters, and they thanked him for looking after her.

He winked at them one last time as they apparated home. With everyone left, he called himself a taxi.

An hour later, he arrived at her home. The front yard was covered in snow, with the exception of the way to the door. He breathed in relief, as it was a good sign if his grandmother was still able to clear the snow.

He pulled out his keys but hesitated a bit. In the end, he decided to knock on the door, as he didn’t want his grandmother to get shocked by his sudden appearance.

After a few seconds, he could hear steps nearing the door. His grandmother opened the door and immediately became incredibly happy to see him. She pulled him into a long hug, and when she called out his name to invite him in, he knew he had arrived at home.

His grandmother looked a bit more tired than he remembered, but she looked fine overall.

He was glad when she began to brew them tea and immediately started to question him about his time at Hogwarts. She was eager to hear stories about some magical adventures he had, but even more eager to hear about Leona and Amy. It made him really happy to see that she was able to have normal conversations with him again and that she showed so much interest in his life even after he had left her behind for three months.

He told her stories about the lessons, the magic he learned, and how Felicia always woke him up by jumping on him after the first sunrays reached him. It was heartwarming to see that his gran could laugh again. While they talked, an alarm rang, and he saw that she went to the kitchen and got herself a vial sealed with a toad emblem. She poured the memory potion into her tea before drinking it, like nothing special had happened.

It was good to see that she had organized it in such a way, even though the potion would lose a bit of effectiveness when mixed with the tea. As his skill made the potion more potent, it more than made up for this drop in effectiveness, so he didn’t even comment on it.

“Thank you, Ethan.” said Grandma Brown after sipping on her tea.

“No need to thank me, grandma. It’s the least I could do.” answered Ethan, simply happy that his grandma was doing well.

“Even when you say that, I really need to thank you. You know, I think without these potions, I wouldn’t be there anymore.” said Grandma Brown and took a handkerchief to wipe a tear away. “You know, sometimes when I had clear moments and realized what I had become, I only wished for it to end as soon as possible. And even if your potions haven’t recovered everything that was lost, I can have a normal life again and be myself again, and for that, I will always be grateful.

Ethan hugged his grandmother, who had started to cry while talking. It had puzzled him a bit that she couldn’t remember everything, but when his skill leveled up further, those lost memories would come back for sure.

“You are a good boy, Ethan.” said Grandma Brown.

After their tea session, Grandma Brown started to make lunch for them. She insisted on doing it alone, like she did when he was just a little kid.

The day he went with his gran to buy a Christmas tree and presents for Leona and Amy. He had bought both of them a box of chocolate, but the main gifts were cards for a Quidditch game with Amy's favorite team. Luckily for him, the team wasn’t playing that well in the last few seasons, which meant the tickets were a lot cheaper than cards for the top matches.

He knew that the gift was tailored more for Amy than Leona, but he thought an invitation to a date would be a terrible Christmas present for someone who wasn’t his girlfriend, so he decided it was better to invite Leona too. He also knew that Leona would be happy just to spend time with them, even though her enthusiasm for Quidditch was not as high as Amy’s.

As Ethan wasn’t able to grind most of his skills, he was able to relax the following days. He spent most of his time with his grandma, writing letters to Amy and Leona, and investing money in the stock market.

Amy really did invite him to her home, but she lived in a small villa outside of London. As his grandmother didn’t have a car because of their financial struggles, he was unable to get there easily. Amy’s mother also didn’t have time to pick him up, so the visit was cancelled. That was until a few days later, another letter arrived, in which Amy said she convinced her mother to pick him up during summer break.

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

Ethan had to chuckle a bit when he imagined that Amy probably pestered her mother for three days straight. It was a nice feeling to see someone so eager to invite you, and even his grandmother told him that Amy sounded like a nice girl. The problem was that, at the moment, he couldn’t say he loved her. He liked her a lot, but he was sure it wasn’t love. At least he believed it was not love. He found it a bit confusing, as he wanted to be open to the idea, but something in the back of his mind was keeping him from committing to it. Just going along with it if he wasn’t sure was something he decided would do more harm than good and could potentially destroy their friendship, so he decided to just wait it out for now.

When he packed the book for his Defence against the Dark Arts lessons in his bag in preparation for his return to Hogwarts, he realized that he hadn’t made any plans for Quirrel yet. Luckily for him, Quirrell shouldn’t be that big of an obstacle, as he would die from Harry’s touch. The only thing he needed to do was find an opportunity to push Harry onto Quirrell. He dismissed the topic after thinking that it shouldn’t be too hard to find an opportunity and that the major hindrance to killing Voldemort would still be getting and destroying the horcruxes.

The next day, after promising his grandma to send her letters from now on, he took a taxi to King’s Cross. When he arrived, he already saw that a few wizards, wearing weird robes with no regard for the statue of secrecy, had arrived and went through the entrance to gate 9 ¾. He even recognized the Weasleys there. Leona and Amy, on the other hand, arrived just a few minutes before the train was due to depart. He was almost worried until he saw them running to enter the train on time. He quickly winked them over to his compartment, and after a quick and a little sweaty hug, he heard how Leona was blaming Amy again because she had spent so much time making her hair. It took a moment for him to realize that Amy had been at Leona's home, which caused them to arrive together.

It was funny to see Leona berating Amy for it because her hair looked worse than usual after they had to run to get the train. It was a bit amusing to see, and he expected a witty retort from Amy, but as she just stayed silent with her head down,Ethan intervened.

“Isn’t it similar to how we first met? It makes me almost nostalgic, even though it was just a few months ago. And the hair isn’t looking as bad as you made it out to be, Leona, and it's easy to fix too. Do you have another hair tie?”

After receiving a hair tie from Leona, who almost always had a ponytail, he tied Amy’s disheveled brown hair together in a ponytail.

What should have been a simple friendly gesture became incredibly awkward when he looked Amy in the eyes while doing it. She looked surprised, shocked even, but the shook turned into an extremely shy and embarrassed look instantly. He cursed himself internally as he realized that this was not something a regular friend would normally do. At least not with this casualness.

The train ride stayed awkward for a while, and Leona and Ethan tried to pretend that nothing happened. While Amy tried to pretend too, she was a bad actor and didn’t even try to hide her big grin.

In the end, it was Leona who broke the silence with some small talk about their Christmas holidays.

When the train arrived at Hogsmeade, they used the carriages to get back to Hogwarts. Ethan ignored the thestrals and pretended not to see them. He wasn’t sure if he could see them because he had died before or if the dead he had seen in his time learning medicine counted, but he wanted to explain neither of them to the others.

After the great feast, the ravenclaws had a small party in the common room to celebrate their return.

Ethan went to bed a bit earlier than the others, but sleeping was impossible. Not only was the embarrassing situation on the train always popping up in his mind, but he was also eager to look after the basilisk egg.

The next day, after their regular schedule, he made up an excuse and looked after the egg. He carefully checked if the toad was still alive by throwing a few flies in there. The familiar “Quak!” from the toad showed him that she was still alive. The basilisk should hatch in the next three to six days, but he didn’t want to risk looking into the box. After checking and seeing the toad was fine, he thought it might be more efficient if he already started to breed another basilisk, just in case a newborn was too weak to destroy the horcrux. So he spent an hour building another box with a feeder. He would get the toad and egg the next day.

The next few days went by faster than expected. Ethans only entered the room with the basilisk eggs, together with rooster Harry and rooster Ron. The two had already grown into small but good-looking roosters with razor-sharp claws. The two were a bit aggressive and would even attack him when he turned his back to them. It wasn’t helping that he got a skill for animal husbandry, chicken husbandry, and rooster husbandry, as he didn’t plan to take either of them. Even if he had to admit that this skill tree was interesting, because he speculated that there would be basilisk husbandry too. A skill that would be worth looking into in case his experiment failed.

On the fourth day, he was lucky enough to be in the room when he heard the eggshell cracking and the toad trying to escape. From the first crack in the eggshell, it took a whole minute until he heard a weird gulping sound and the toad's quacking disappeared. In the same breath, he received the basilisk breeding skill, which he naturally declined. To level the skill to a reasonable level, he would have to breed thousands of basilisks, so even if he had a skillslot open, he would have declined the skill.

After hearing the basilisk fight against the shield charm, he decided to end the experiment as soon as possible. He freed Rooster Harry from the petrificus totalus he had cast on him so that he would remain quiet and stop attacking him. Rooster Harry immediately started to crow loudly before attacking him.

The moment Rooster Harry started to crow, he heard a hiss racked with pain. The basilisk was squirming in the box, trying to escape. The hissing didn’t stop even after Roster Harry was back in stasis. The basilisk was tormented for two whole minutes, during which it tried its best to break out before it died. The observation was quite interesting from a magical point of view, as it wasn’t the sound of the crowing that killed the basilisk but some kind of innate curse that was triggered by the crowing. The experiment also showed him that it was far too dangerous to enter the chamber of secrets without good preparations, as even a newborn basilisk could survive two minutes of the curse.

Ethan shook the box just to make sure the basilisk was dead before he removed the shield charm. He then put a sack over the opening of the box and carefully let the basilisk slide out into the sack. As the basilisk's eyes didn’t lose their ability after the basilisk died, he had to be extraordinarily careful. After making out the head by touch, he used defindo to cut off the snout of the basilisk. The sack was immediately drenched in warm red blood. Ethan could feel the heat of the blood through his gloves as he pulled the snout out of the sack. He then went with the blood-dripping snout to Ravenclaw's diadem and tried to ram the teeth into the horcrux.

He was immediately pushed back by a shockwave of dark energy, and the basilisk's snout was croumbling to ashes.

His first experiment had failed, which meant he had to keep a basilisk alive for a whole year or wait until Harry killed the one in the chamber of secrets.