Quidditch practice conflicts with Slytherin were a structural feature of the Hogwarts term, not an accident. Kevin had concluded this within the first week of watching Oliver Wood go from cheerful to homicidal every time Flint materialised on the pitch during a scheduled Gryffindor slot.
Today's version: Slytherin materialised with brooms, a signed permission slip from Snape, and Draco at the front looking like he'd been practicing his entrance. His family had apparently gifted the entire team new Nimbus 2001s.
"You might as well forfeit," Draco said to Harry, with the air of someone delivering a regrettable inevitability. "We've got better equipment."
"Quidditch isn't decided by equipment," Hermione said.
"Gryffindor's been running rings around Slytherin for two years," Kevin added mildly. "New brooms won't fix the fundamentals."
Flint, who had been watching this exchange with the expression of someone waiting for a gap, found one.
"Shut it," he said, "you filthy little Mudblood."
The word landed in the air like something dropped.
Draco's face went white. He took an actual step backward. His eyes went to Kevin with the speed of someone who has suddenly remembered that consequences exist.
Kevin's fist hit Flint in the stomach.
Not a warning. Not a demonstration. He put genuine force into it, the kind that moved through the point of contact and kept going, and Flint left the ground for a moment before the wall decided to involve itself.
He slid down it and stayed down, bleeding from his mouth, making a sound that had moved past words into something more fundamental.
The rest of the Slytherin team had backed into a loose cluster. Nobody moved toward Flint. Nobody moved toward Kevin.
Kevin turned to face them.
"Your captain," he said, "insulted her." The calm in his voice was not the calm of someone who wasn't angry. It was something colder. "You all heard it. You'll all apologise."
Draco stepped forward first, which Kevin noted.
"Sorry," Draco said to Hermione, direct, without the deflection of someone performing the apology. He'd understood from the first second what had happened and what it cost.
The others followed in a rapid, slightly scrambled chorus, pushed by the specific social gravity of watching their captain collapsed against a wall and the person responsible standing extremely still in front of them.
Hermione, who had not cried, looked at the apologies and then looked away, the corners of her mouth doing something complicated.
Kevin turned to the team. "Pitch is ours. Go."
They went. Draco went with them, glancing back once.
Hermione walked up to Kevin and put her arms around him from behind, pressing her face into his back.
He stood there and let her, hands at his sides.
"You didn't have to," she said, muffled.
"Yes I did."
She didn't argue.
Snape arrived within four minutes, which meant someone had run very fast. He took in the scene — Kevin and Hermione near the pitch entrance, Flint making reduced sounds against the wall, the Slytherin team conspicuously absent — with the expression of a man cataloguing information before forming an opinion.
"Mr. Kevin," he said. "Explain."
Kevin stepped in front of Hermione. "Flint called her a Mudblood. I hit him."
Snape's face did something. It was brief — a flicker of something that moved through his expression so quickly it was almost not there. He went still for one complete second in a way that was different from his usual stillness.
Then he turned, flicked his wand, and Flint was lifted by invisible force and dragged away down the corridor at approximately the speed of a person being ejected from a space they are no longer welcome in.
Kevin watched him go. He filed the moment carefully — the half-second freeze, the specific quality of Snape's silence. Some memories were older than others.
He turned back to Hermione and patted her head.
"Blood status is a pedigree argument," he said. "Pets have pedigrees. You're not a pet."
She laughed, which surprised her slightly, and pressed her forehead to his shoulder.
They spent the rest of the afternoon at the lake, sitting in the grass with their shoes off. The water was flat and grey-silver in the October light. Hermione talked about nothing particular for a while, which Kevin had learned meant she was processing something she didn't want to name yet, so he listened and didn't push.
By the time they headed back, she'd stopped flinching at random moments. He counted that as resolution enough.
They spotted Harry in a corridor, moving along the wall with Ron shadowing him, both looking hunted.
"Harry. What happened?"
Harry stopped. He looked exhausted in the specific way of someone who has been looked at all day by people who have decided something about them without asking. "I heard the voice again. Earlier. There was another attack — Justin Finch-Fletchley. And Nearly Headless Nick."
He showed them the corridor. The writing was there — The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the Heir, beware — in something dark and still wet-looking, and Mrs. Norris hanging stiff from the torch bracket.
Kevin looked at the writing. He looked at Harry.
"Don't touch anything," he said. "People are coming."
They were. The feast was letting out. The crowd built fast, and with it the looks — landing on Harry with the specific weight of a hundred people who have already decided.
Kevin watched it happen.
When the third person muttered something pointed, he walked up to the table and kicked one of the legs. Hard. The whole thing shuddered. Books slid.
"Something to say?" he said to the table generally.
Nobody said it out loud.
McGonagall appeared from the far end of the corridor. Kevin zipped it, which took effort.