Kevin woke the next morning with the particular alertness of someone whose body had decided that ten hours of sleep was exactly sufficient and that further rest was wasteful. He said goodbye to Madam Pomfrey, who reminded him that she ran a hospital wing and not a hotel, and walked back to the dormitory through corridors that smelled of cold stone and early breakfast.
He hauled Harry and Ron out of bed. They complained. He waited them out. They got up.
The Great Hall was bright and loud. Hermione was already at the Gryffindor table, a book propped open beside her plate, eating with the calm efficiency of someone who had decided to make productive use of every available minute.
She looked up when Kevin sat down and her expression did the thing it had been doing since last night — a warmth that arrived before the composed exterior could get there first.
"Morning," she said.
"You too." Kevin poured himself juice and reached across for the toast.
Harry dropped into the seat beside him, looking at his plate without enthusiasm. Quidditch this morning. His first match, first year, against Slytherin. The combination of circumstances had apparently done something to his appetite.
"Harry," Kevin said.
Harry looked up.
"Eat something. You'll be useless up there on an empty stomach."
Ron was already eating with the dedicated focus of someone who had decided that Harry's match was the most important event in recent history and that fuelling himself appropriately was therefore a patriotic duty.
"How is flying tiring?" Kevin asked, mostly to have something to argue about. "You're sitting on a broomstick."
Hermione gave him a look that communicated a specific type of exasperation. "Flying a broom is not just sitting. The sustained concentration alone —" She paused, apparently deciding that explaining aeronautical magical physics to Kevin before nine in the morning was more work than it was worth. She pushed half her sandwich across the table at him instead. "Eat that."
Kevin ate it. Hermione watched him with a look that she probably didn't realise was on her face.
She'd started doing this — small adjustments, small offerings — and Kevin had started accepting them with a naturalness that neither of them had commented on. The dynamic had calcified somewhere between the troll corridor and the hospital wing into something that felt, to both of them, entirely obvious.
Mid-chew, Kevin spotted Snape approaching from the staff table — not directly, but on a trajectory that would bring him to Harry's shoulder in about six steps. Kevin noted the angle.
"Good morning, Professor Snape."
Snape stopped. His trajectory had been calibrated for a different opening, and Kevin had disrupted it. He directed a look at Kevin that communicated this with considerable economy.
"Mr. Kevin." He pivoted smoothly to loom over Harry instead. "I trust you're prepared for this morning, Mr. Potter. Slytherin plays to win."
Harry went still. Six months of Snape had not made him any more comfortable under the man's gaze, and at nine in the morning before his first Quidditch match, he had limited resources for managing it.
Kevin, still eating, said: "Slytherin? Any good?"
Snape turned the look on him.
Kevin took another bite.
There was a silence. Hermione pressed her lips together. Snape's jaw moved once, calculating, and then he said: "Close your mouth when you chew," and walked away.
Harry stared at Kevin. Then started eating.
"Was that on purpose?" he asked.
"Eat," Kevin said.
Once Snape was out of range, Harry leaned forward. "I've been thinking. His leg last night — someone bit him. And he was definitely in that corridor, near the Stone. He's working for Voldemort."
Kevin let him finish. Harry needed the theory. It was doing useful work, sharpening his attention on the real danger even if it was pointed at the wrong target.
"Could be," Kevin said carefully. He caught Hermione's sideways glance — she'd been quiet on the Snape question since the troll corridor, her position quietly adjusting. "Eat your breakfast first."
Ron's eyes lit up mid-chew. "And if he's the one — "
"Breakfast," Kevin and Hermione said together.
An owl swept in and deposited a long package directly over Harry's head. He snagged it, and they gathered close. Inside: a Nimbus 2000, clean lines, the wood almost warm-looking even in the morning light. Harry looked up toward the staff table. McGonagall was watching, and when she met his eye she smiled — quickly, a thing she seemed to have decided she was allowed — and looked away.
Kevin watched Harry's face change. The Quidditch nerves didn't disappear, but they shifted. He looked at the broomstick the way you look at something that proves you belong somewhere.
"Right," Kevin said. "Now you can be nervous properly. Finish your eggs."
Kevin sat in the stands between Hermione and Ron, a scarf wound twice around his neck against the October cold.
He had no particular investment in Quidditch, which he found watching was roughly equivalent to having a minor investment in Quidditch — the speed and the danger were hard to look away from even if you hadn't memorised the rules. The Gryffindor stands were noise and colour and the particular atmosphere of people who have decided they are going to win this one.
Hermione had borrowed Ron's binoculars. Kevin sat with his hands in his pockets and watched without them.
He saw Harry's broom start to buck about four minutes in — not weather, not inexperience. The kind of targeted, continuous interference that didn't happen by accident. Harry was fighting for his position with the grim determination of someone who had decided he was not falling off this broomstick, which Kevin found himself unreservedly rooting for.
He reached over and took the binoculars from Hermione.
He found Snape in the opposite stand, his lips moving in a pattern that was too small and too regular to be conversation. Occlumency breathing, someone might have said. Kevin read it differently.
He handed the binoculars back.
"Come with me," he said to Hermione.
"What? Why?" She was already reading the situation in his face. "Kevin — "
"Come on." He was already moving along the bench, stepping past Ron, heading for the stairs down from the stand.
She followed. They ducked under the wooden structure of the opposite stand, threading between the support struts, and came up at the back. Kevin moved along the row until he was roughly behind where Snape was sitting.
Hermione tugged his sleeve. She'd figured it out. Her expression said, clearly, that she had opinions about this.
Kevin pointed his wand at the base of Snape's seat.
"Incendio."
The wood caught.
He grabbed Hermione's wrist and walked briskly back the way they'd come before the shouting started behind them.
They were twenty metres away and facing the other direction when the section above them erupted in noise — the specific human sound of a contained fire panic, followed by the louder, more immediate sound of Snape leaping from his seat with rather more urgency than was dignified. Kevin heard it without turning around.
Hermione's hand was over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.
"You," she said, not loudly.
"Hm?"
"You just set Professor Snape's seat on fire."
"Technically I set the wood on fire. The seat was adjacent."
She made a sound that was not quite a laugh and pressed both hands over her face. From the stands above, the crowd noise shifted — the particular register of something happening on the pitch, a change in direction, a gasp moving through the crowd like a wave.
They looked up in time to see Harry in a full dive, streaking downward at an angle that didn't look voluntary and then very suddenly did. He pulled up hard, something bright in his closed fist, and nearly hit the ground before he got his broom level.
He spat the Golden Snitch onto his palm.
The Gryffindor stand went completely mad.
Kevin watched Harry land, watched the team converge on him, watched the particular physical expression of joy that happens when someone has done the thing they were born to do for the very first time.
Hermione had stopped covering her mouth. She was laughing properly now, the kind that required her to press her shoulder against Kevin's to stay upright.
"His face," she managed. "When he realised he'd swallowed it —"
"Very dignified," Kevin agreed.
They were both laughing when they came around to the front of the stands. They made it back to the Gryffindor celebration with composure restored, which nobody believed for a moment but nobody challenged.
Snape, white-faced, was standing at the far end of the pitch being attended to by Professor Sprout, who was applying what appeared to be a damp cloth to a situation Kevin elected not to examine too closely.
He looked away before Snape's gaze swept the crowd.
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