The room erupted.
No words. No pause. Just wands.
Kevin pressed two fingers to his forehead and counted silently to three.
"Immobulus."
The spell caught all three of them — Harry, Lupin, and Snape — mid-motion. They locked solid. Eyes still darting, still burning with whatever they'd been about to do, but bodies completely still.
The room went quiet.
"Would it genuinely kill any of you to talk first?" Kevin asked no one in particular.
He stepped around Snape, eased Lupin off him, and lifted Snape's wand from his frozen fingers with calm precision. Snape's eyes tracked the motion with a fury that would absolutely have consequences later.
"Professor Snape." Kevin held the wand up so Snape could see it. He shook his other hand slightly — the rat thrashing inside. "Lupin and Sirius aren't the problem. This rat is."
He looked at Harry. "Snape came to protect us. He was wrong about the situation, not the instinct. Don't do anything stupid when I release you."
He crossed to Sirius, still against the wall where Snape's Stupefy had thrown him.
"Rennervate."
Sirius came back with a sharp breath. He took in the frozen tableau — Severus locked mid-step, Remus immobile, Harry with murder in his eyes — and opened his mouth.
"Severus, you absolute —"
"Mr. Black." Kevin's voice was level. "I have the rat. He isn't going anywhere. Whatever you need to settle, you can settle it today. But not like this."
Sirius looked at him. Something in the steadiness of it got through. He closed his mouth.
Kevin released the three frozen figures.
Nobody moved. The air between Sirius and Snape crackled with twelve years of accumulated grievance.
Kevin held Snape's wand out handle-first. "Professor. Let me run this."
Snape looked at him for a long, assessing beat. Then he took the wand, straightened his robes, and stationed himself by the door with the posture of a man who had decided to observe rather than participate. It was the closest thing to agreement Kevin was going to get.
Sirius stared. Then he looked at Kevin with new eyes.
"You actually talked him down."
"I gave him his wand back," Kevin said. "Different thing. Now — Mr. Black. You say Scabbers is Peter Pettigrew. Prove it."
He held out the struggling rat.
Lupin retrieved his own wand from the floor. Sirius took the rat from Kevin and looked down at it with the expression of a man who had spent twelve years imagining this exact moment.
"Coming out cleanly, Peter? Or shall I make it unpleasant for you?"
The rat went still for half a second. Then Sirius spoke a short, sharp incantation and the creature swelled — ballooning outward, limbs extending, fur retreating — and landed on the floorboards as a short, sweating, balding man with protuberant eyes and a finger missing from his right hand.
He looked exactly like what he was: someone who had been hiding for a very long time and understood that the hiding was finished.
Ron made a sound that had no words in it.
Kevin put a hand briefly on his shoulder.
Peter Pettigrew looked around the room with fast, desperate eyes. They found Harry.
"Harry!" His voice was thick and ingratiating. "You look just like your father — James was my friend — I was always his friend —"
Sirius kicked him. Not gently.
Peter scrambled across the floor.
"Don't say his name." Sirius's voice had dropped below anger into something colder. "Don't you dare say James's name."
"You sold them to Voldemort," Harry said. Quiet. Certain.
"No! No — I had no choice — Voldemort had ways of — if it had been you, Sirius, in my position, you would have —"
"I would have died first." Sirius levelled his wand. "I would have died before I gave them up."
Another kick. Peter curled on the floor, shaking, whimpering.
Lupin raised his wand alongside Sirius.
"Stop."
Harry's voice cut through both of them.
Both wands paused.
"Killing him doesn't clear Sirius," Harry said. "Killing him means Sirius stays guilty in the eyes of everyone who wasn't in this room."
The logic landed. Sirius's jaw worked. His wand arm dropped an inch, then another. Lupin followed.
Peter went on whimpering into the floorboards.
"We take him to the castle," Harry said. "We give him to the Ministry. They see what he actually is."
Snape, at the door, said nothing. But he didn't argue.
Sirius landed two more kicks — Kevin had mentally allotted him a reasonable number — and then straightened up, chest heaving.
"Right," he said. "Fine."
Kevin looked at Peter for a moment.
"One practical problem," he said. "He can transform any time he likes. If he goes rat while we're walking him through the tunnel, he's gone."
"Ropes won't hold an Animagus," Snape said from the door, in the tone of a man tired of explaining obvious things. "He shrinks out of any binding."
"I know." Kevin walked over, crouched in front of Peter, and took hold of his arms with methodical calm.
He set one foot against Peter's back for leverage, gripped the left arm, and pulled.
The shoulder dislocated with a dull crack.
Peter's scream filled the room for approximately one second before Kevin hit him with Silencio.
Quiet.
Kevin straightened up and looked around at the expressions.
Sirius and Lupin were wearing identical looks that fell somewhere between horrified and deeply satisfied. Harry and the others had gone pale. Snape's expression had shifted by precisely one degree toward approval.
Kevin crouched again, took hold of the right ankle, and broke it cleanly.
Peter's mouth opened in a silent scream. He collapsed forward.
"Now he can't run," Kevin said, standing. "Should we go?"
He levitated Peter — silently screaming, unable to move — and headed for the stairs.
The moon was extraordinary tonight, sharp and cold, turning the snow-covered grounds into something that looked almost carved. Sirius walked through it with his head up and his eyes open, breathing the open air as if it were something he'd been rationed for twelve years and had only just been given back.
Harry kept pace right beside him.
"Still the same view," Sirius said, looking up at the lit castle windows, the towers rising black against the sky. "I remember my first week here. You make friends in a place like this. You find people who feel like family." A pause. "Hold onto it."
Harry looked at the same windows.
"Yeah," he said. "I think I already have."
Sirius put his arm around Harry's shoulders. Harry laughed — the kind that comes from something tight in your chest finally releasing.
Peter drifted silently behind them under Kevin's levitation charm, under Snape's cold watch, entirely unable to make a sound.
Kevin glanced at the full moon. Then at Lupin.
"Professor. You didn't drink your Wolfsbane."
Lupin stopped. The colour drained from his face. "I — I was going to, but I heard the Willow and I ran —"
Snape, from two steps back: "I had it prepared at noon."
"Professor, I anticipated this." Kevin was already reaching into his bag. He uncorked a vial and held it out, steam curling from the mouth. "Spare batch."
Lupin glanced at Snape — a reflex, checking quality.
Snape gave a single nod. No elaboration. He'd have tested anyone else. He didn't test this.
Lupin drank it down. The tension went out of his shoulders immediately.
"Go. Take the rest of them in. I'll stay here tonight — it's fine."
Kevin nodded and turned them back toward the castle.