"Ow — careful — "
"Hold still —"
"That hurts, Hermione — "
"If you'd left it alone on the train it wouldn't be this tangled — "
The sounds drifting down from Hermione's room had a quality that made Mr. Granger, in the hallway below, reach for the nearest available object and begin moving toward the stairs with purpose.
Mrs. Granger caught his arm.
Two small heads appeared at the top of the stairs. Hermione, holding a hairbrush. Kevin, holding the side of his head with an expression of injured dignity.
"What," they both said, looking at the Grangers frozen in their tableau at the bottom of the staircase.
Mrs. Granger looked at the hairbrush. The tangle visible in Hermione's hair. Kevin's wince.
She released her husband's arm.
Mr. Granger set down the kitchen knife he'd apparently picked up. He cleared his throat. "Nothing. Carry on."
Hermione clocked the knife and went brick red. "We were untangling my hair — "
"We know, sweetheart," Mrs. Granger said, in the tone of someone who genuinely knows and is also finding the whole situation enormously funny.
Kevin finished the untangling with considerably more caution, swore quietly to himself that he was never touching it again, and found the next two days remarkably peaceful by comparison.
Hermione's holiday itinerary was comprehensive, colour-coded in her head if not on paper, and non-negotiable. Kevin followed her through it with the cheerful compliance of someone who has decided that other people's plans are the most restful kind.
The high street was bright with Christmas preparation, the shopfronts competing for attention and the pavements thick with people who all had somewhere specific to be. Hermione navigated it with authority. Kevin held her hand so they wouldn't be separated in the crowd, which seemed practical, and which Hermione accepted with only a slight pause and the knowledge that her cheeks were warm enough that she was grateful for the cold air.
He found a Santa hat at a stall and put it on her immediately.
She looked at him.
He found a white beard and added it.
She looked at herself in the shop window. Adjusted the beard. Put on a gravelly voice: "Ho ho ho. I've been very busy this year."
Kevin's face. "Very good. You're hired."
She found him a pair of reindeer antlers in the same stall. She put them on him with the air of someone making an executive decision.
So Santa and her primary reindeer walked through the Christmas market for the rest of the afternoon, and the Grangers trailed behind them grinning, and Hermione laughed more in that afternoon than she remembered laughing in a long time, and Kevin bought her a bag of warm sugared almonds from a stall and placed one in her mouth when she was mid-sentence, and she chewed it and looked at him with an expression that she couldn't have explained to anyone.
She wanted all of this saved somewhere. She wanted it to be something she could keep.
New Year's Eve.
The bells started somewhere in the neighbourhood and spread, and then they were everywhere, and the new year arrived with the uncomplicated generosity of something that doesn't require anything of you except to be present for it.
"Merry Christmas," Kevin said quietly, because the words felt right even several days late.
Hermione looked at him. The garden was dark and cold and the light from the kitchen window made everything warm at the edges.
"Merry Christmas, Kevin," she said.
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his cheek — quick, light, gone before she'd fully decided to do it — and then walked inside.
Kevin stood in the garden for a moment with his hand against his cheek.
His heart was doing something irregular and inconvenient that he chose not to examine too closely.
He went inside.
Hermione spent most of the following morning finding reasons to be in different rooms to Kevin, which was notable given that she was usually the one engineering shared proximity. Her cheeks did the thing when their eyes met. She dropped a book. She explained the book-dropping by attributing it to the floor being slightly uneven, which Kevin accepted without comment as the gentlest possible act of mercy.
The owl post arrived mid-morning and broke the tension with the effectiveness of a thrown bucket of cold water.
Harry and Ron had coordinated. Same wrapping, same gift: a notebook and quill for each of them.
Kevin opened his and raised an eyebrow. "Coordinated."
"They definitely talked about it," Hermione said, already unwrapping hers.
Kevin had sent them both potions kits — a careful assortment of things for staying alive, brewed in Snape's lab in stolen hours. He had, in the process of said stolen hours, also taken the opportunity to look very carefully at a battered, heavily annotated textbook he'd found on one of the lower shelves.
He opened Snape's gift.
The same textbook. With a note attached.
Search my workshop again and there will be consequences. — S.S.
Kevin looked at the note. Looked at the book.
"Oh," he said.
"What?" Hermione leaned over.
He showed her.
She laughed. Then schooled it immediately. "You absolutely deserved that."
"I learned enormously from it."
"You went through a professor's private workshop —"
"And gained knowledge," Kevin said, "which is arguably the point of being here."
She gave him a look that said she disagreed with this reasoning and also that she could not entirely suppress finding him funny, which was a look he had catalogued as one of his favourites.
McGonagall's gifts were extraordinary: a Time-Turner for Hermione — small, gold, dangerous with possibility — and for Kevin, a bag with a Seamless Extension Charm that made his previous one look like a sandwich pouch.
Hermione held the Time-Turner carefully in both palms. Read the note — study purposes only, Ministry conditions apply, do not be reckless — and looked up with an expression that Kevin read clearly: she had complained to McGonagall about not keeping pace with him, and McGonagall had done something about it.
"She listened," Hermione said quietly.
"She always listens," Kevin said. "She just usually waits until she's decided what to do about it."
Hagrid's gift was a sack of magical creature components worth more than Kevin's entire current savings, delivered with a note that said simply For the potions, not the cooking. Kevin looked at this for a moment and felt a genuine pang of affection for Hagrid that was not complicated by any ulterior motive.
He and Hermione saved each other's gifts for last, by unspoken agreement.
She opened his: a worn, handwritten book. Every page his own hand, the ink slightly faded in places where he'd gone back to revise, the margins cramped with notes and small sketches of apparatus. Kevin's Treasure Trove on the first page. Every formula he'd developed, every technique he'd refined through the grinding months in Snape's lab. The knowledge he'd built through trial and error and the particular stubbornness of someone who had decided that a subject mattered and was going to master it.
Hermione turned the pages slowly.
She knew where he'd been for the last several weeks. She knew what the dark circles had cost him. She could feel it in the pages — not sentimentally, but practically. The density of the work. The evidence of how many times he'd started again.
She put the book down and hugged him, which she did with the full commitment of someone who had been thinking about doing it for a while.
"Thank you," she said into his shoulder.
"Snape reinforced the binding," Kevin said. "It'll outlast us both."
She laughed, muffled, and didn't let go immediately.
Kevin opened hers: a cloak in deep blue with gold stripes down the front, the fabric heavier than it looked, the stitching slightly uneven in places that said handmade to anyone looking closely.
He looked at her.
She was looking at the floor with an expression of careful neutrality that was doing limited work.
He stood up and put it on. It sat on his shoulders like it had been waiting to. The length was slightly long — she'd accounted for him growing into it.
"You made this," he said.
"It took a while to get the charm work right." Still looking at the floor. "McGonagall helped with the extension properties."
"Hermione."
She looked up.
"It's perfect," he said.
Her expression did the thing it always did when he said something that landed: the careful composure and the warmth underneath it arriving at the same moment and cancelling neither out.
"Hmph," she said, with dignity. "The cloak makes you look better than you are."
"Obviously," Kevin agreed, and struck his full victory pose — hands on hips, chin up, grinning — in the brand-new deep blue cloak.
She threw a pillow at him.
Director Hope was shovelling snow in the orphanage yard when Kevin came through the gate.
"Little Kevin." He turned, leaning on the shovel. "Back already? What did you do?"
"It's holidays," Kevin said.
"Hah. Same difference." He opened his arms and Kevin walked into the hug, and Hope's bony hand patted his back with the warmth of someone who has very few people they are genuinely glad to see and is not embarrassed about showing it.
Kevin pulled out the Extension Charm bag and began unloading it — food, treats, a substantial amount of money in an envelope that made Hope look up at him with something between pride and alarm.
"Potions," Kevin said simply. "I've been selling."
They were there for two days. Hermione came the second afternoon and sat with the director while he told stories about Kevin at seven, at nine, at eleven — each one more embarrassing than the last. Kevin sat very still and waited for his opportunity for revenge and accepted that it was not coming today.
Hermione was laughing too hard to be stopped.
He catalogued this for use at the Grangers.
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