The weeks between that first Potions detention and Halloween settled into a rhythm.
Kevin ran in the mornings. Worked through his classes with the steady attention of someone building something rather than simply getting through it. Spent evenings with Hermione in the library more often than not, the two of them working in parallel — she on her assigned reading, he on whatever auxiliary question his current subject had raised. They talked through the problems that resisted solution and competed, without ever formally agreeing to compete, on everything that could be made into a competition.
She was frequently faster than him on research. He was occasionally more lateral in his thinking. Both of them were clearly ahead of their year group, which neither mentioned out loud because neither needed to.
Harry practised Quidditch. Ron went along to watch and comment, which was its own form of support. The three of them intersected at meals and evenings and moved through the castle with the comfortable ease of people who had decided, without much discussion, that they were going to be in each other's lives.
Snape appeared every few days. Kevin went. He learned things.
His potions skill was operating, by Halloween, at a level that bore very little resemblance to where he'd started. The work Snape set was demanding but the demands made sense — each list built on the previous one, and Kevin had begun to see the underlying structure of it, the way each technique was a component in something larger. He was starting to develop intuitions about ingredient interactions rather than simply memorising them, which was the difference between knowing chemistry and doing chemistry.
He explained this to Hermione one evening at the library, who found it interesting enough to ask follow-up questions for twenty minutes.
The Charms classroom on Halloween afternoon smelled like chalk and something faintly floral from whatever Flitwick had been demonstrating to the fifth-years earlier. The first-years filed in and took their seats, and Flitwick climbed onto his pile of books and announced that today they would attempt the Levitation Charm.
Wingardium Leviosa. Standard. Kevin knew the incantation, knew the wrist motion, understood the principle.
He watched Ron across the room struggling with it — the wand flailing, the incantation rushed, the feather sitting on the desk with complete indifference to his efforts.
Hermione, next to Ron, watched this for approximately ninety seconds before she reached her limit.
"It's LeviOsa," she said, with the tone of someone who had read the correct pronunciation three times and could not understand why others hadn't. "Not LeviosAH. The stress is on the second syllable."
She demonstrated. Her feather lifted off the desk, hovered at eye level, and descended gently when she released the spell.
Ron stared at it. Then at her. His expression moved through several stages.
Kevin, across the room, watched this happen. He watched Ron lean toward Harry and say something. Couldn't hear it — but he could see Hermione's posture, two rows ahead, change. The way her spine straightened, the way her chin came up fractionally, the way her hand closed more tightly around her wand. She'd heard.
After class, in the corridor, Ron let it out properly to Harry — the particular pressure valve of someone who had felt small and expressed it as contempt. Kevin was three steps behind them and caught every word.
No wonder she has no friends. Honestly, living with her would be a nightmare.
Kevin said his name.
Ron turned. Found Kevin looking at him. Said nothing.
Hermione walked past them with her book held against her chest, head down, and didn't look up.
Kevin waited until she'd turned the corner. "She was trying to help you," he said. "She thought you were frustrated and she was trying to help. Apologise when you can."
Ron opened his mouth. Closed it.
Kevin went after Hermione.
The girls' bathroom on the first floor. He found the right one by the faint sound of crying from the gap under the door — not dramatic, just quiet and persistent, the sound of someone who had gone somewhere private to be upset without witnesses.
He didn't go in. He sat down with his back against the corridor wall, opened the book he'd been carrying, and read.
The corridor was cold. The torches at this end of the building were set low for the evening. Kevin read two chapters and thought about nothing in particular and kept half his attention on the bathroom door.
In the Great Hall, the Halloween feast was underway — hundreds of students crowded at four long tables, the ceiling above carved into a jagged October sky, jack-o'-lanterns floating in their dozens. Harry was at the Gryffindor table. Ron was at the Gryffindor table. Both of them had apparently asked around and been told: Hermione was in the bathroom, Kevin had gone after her.
Ron was eating with slightly less enthusiasm than usual.
Kevin was still in the corridor when the doors of the Great Hall banged open.
He heard it from two floors up — not the bang itself, but the quality of noise that followed it. The kind of silence that falls when something has gone very wrong in a large group of people.
Then Quirrell's voice, carrying up through the stone: high and cracking, stripped of its usual performative stammer.
"Troll — troll in the dungeons — "
Kevin closed his book.
He heard the distant sound of benches scraping, of Dumbledore's voice rising over the noise with calm authority, of prefects beginning to organise movement. The feast was ending. The castle was mobilising.
He stood up, knocked twice on the bathroom door, and said clearly: "Hermione. There's a troll in the castle. I need you to come out now."
A pause. Then: "A what?"
"A troll. We need to move."
The door opened. Hermione stood in the gap, her eyes red-rimmed, her expression moving from embarrassed to confused to alarmed in quick succession. "A troll — how — "
"I don't know yet. Come on." He held out his hand. She took it without thinking, and they moved.
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