The common room settled after the applause. Harry sat with Seamus and, for the next two hours, told the story of the graveyard properly — everything, or everything he could say without getting into the parts that required Occlumency clearance. He was patient about it. The room listened.
Harry's version omitted Kevin's role in the resurrection and placed them both as Tournament competitors who had unknowingly grabbed the same Portkey. They'd arrived in the graveyard together, been separated, and Kevin had pulled Harry out at the critical moment.
It was a good story. It had the additional quality of being mostly true.
By the end of it, no one in Gryffindor was visibly unconvinced. Some were still processing. Several of the younger students had gone very quiet in the way that came from understanding, for the first time, that a thing you'd been told was impossible was actually not impossible.
The room slowly broke into smaller groups, and then into individuals heading for bed, and eventually only Harry's core group remained, and Harry looked wrung out but lighter.
"Class," he said. "We should tell people. Not just Gryffindor."
They'd talked about timing — waiting for the school to settle, recruiting quietly. But the common room tonight had shown what a direct conversation could do, and the fact that half the school was already discussing it anyway meant quiet recruitment was already out the window.
"This weekend," Kevin said. "Announce it openly. Dumbledore's Army — or whatever name you settle on. Come train, come learn, we're not hiding."
Harry nodded. "Dumbledore's Army. I like that."
"Fudge'll love it," Ron said, grinning.
Kevin wrote down the name, the meeting time, the pitch. Then he looked at Harry. "You're running it. I've got four years of Potions eating my schedule."
"You could still teach—"
"I'll come when I can. But this is yours, Harry. It should be."
Harry looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
"Whoever runs you hardest in a session gets private lessons from me," Kevin added.
It sounded like a joke. In the particular way Kevin delivered things that were completely serious, it sounded like a joke.
Harry came down to breakfast the next morning looking tired.
Ron noticed immediately. "Bad night?"
"Couldn't sleep for a while," Harry said. "Lots to think about. Eventually went under. Weird dreams, but I can't quite—" He frowned, chasing the impression. A dark corridor. A door at the end of it. Something he needed to reach.
He shook his head.
Kevin was watching him from across the table with an expression that lasted about two seconds before it smoothed back to normal.
The dreams were starting. The connection to Voldemort, bleeding through Harry's defenses — not strongly yet, but the pattern was beginning. Kevin filed it, said nothing specific, and made a note to adjust the timing on the alert amulets.
What he said aloud was: "You didn't exhaust yourself enough yesterday. More drilling tonight. Then you'll sleep."
Harry gave him a flat look. "That's your solution to everything."
"It works."
"It's not a solution, it's just—"
"Tonight. Extra sets."
Harry accepted this with the expression of a person who had learned that arguing with Kevin on matters of physical training was a waste of energy he could be using on physical training.
They finished breakfast. Ron wanted the full Umbridge debrief. They moved to the corridor outside, where the audience was smaller.
"Moody spent most of the time scanning her memory and learning her voice and mannerisms," Kevin said, keeping the name out of it on principle. "She walked into my workshop alone because she thought I was a potential ally."
"How'd you actually take her down?" Ron pressed.
"Grabbed her before she could cast. Floor's warded for noise and Apparition, and the eighth floor is quiet at that hour. Nobody saw anything. She walked out afterward under her own power — or what looked like it."
"Where is she now?"
"Moody set up a suite," Kevin said.
"A suite?" Ron started to ask.
"Don't," Harry said.
Ron reconsidered. They went to breakfast.
Hermione was already there, book open beside her plate, eating with the precise efficiency of someone who had planned her morning to the minute.
She looked up when Kevin sat, and smiled with the particular warmth she reserved for early morning, which was different from her daytime warmth in ways Kevin couldn't exactly articulate but had catalogued thoroughly.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Completely," he said, which was true. His first-through-fourth-year Potions sessions had been in development since August. He'd been ready for weeks.
Hermione had rehearsed his schedule back at him twice already this morning. He didn't tell her this, because the third time she rehearsed it would mean she'd caught him off guard again, which would lead to a fourth time.
"Good. Don't slouch at the front of the room."
"I never slouch."
"You slouch when you're explaining something and you think the class has stopped judging you."
Kevin opened his mouth to deny this. He had a memory of doing exactly that in a second-year Charms demonstration last year. He closed his mouth.
"I'll stand straight," he said.
Hermione nodded with satisfaction and returned to her book.
The morning class with the first-years went well. He kicked the door open — slightly harder than strictly necessary — and had the room's complete attention before he'd said a word. He covered theory cleanly, got them all brewing something simple before the hour was out, and left them with more material than most students expected from a single class and a clear framework for how to use it.
By the time he came back through the door of his workshop afterward, Dumbledore was sitting in the chair by the corner cabinet, examining the warded trunk with an expression of polite innocence.
"Classes go well?" the Headmaster asked.
"Very. And you already knew that — you've been here for at least twenty minutes."
Dumbledore smiled. "The trunk."
"Is warded. Heavily. I know."
"If anyone with the right clearance looked too carefully—"
"Nobody on the eighth floor has that clearance except you and me."
Dumbledore added another ward anyway, with the unhurried ease of a man who found wards decorative as much as functional. Kevin watched him and decided not to argue.
"Headmaster. I have a question about alchemy."
Dumbledore paused. Something shifted in his expression — not surprise exactly, but a recalibration. Interest, the real kind. "Do you?"
"I want to build a linked alert network. Emergency signal, distributed across multiple bearers. Triggered by magical attack or distress. Central hub." Kevin laid it out quickly and cleanly, the same way he'd been rehearsing in his head for the better part of a week. "I've got the storage component working, and I've got the signal component working. What I haven't solved is the synchronization — making sure the hub can distinguish a real attack from sparring, and identifying which bearer triggered it."
Dumbledore was quiet for a moment.
Then: "That's a rather sophisticated problem."
"Yes."
"And you've already solved the component problems independently."
"Yes."
Another pause. Dumbledore looked at Kevin the way he sometimes looked at Kevin — like he was revising something inward, some ongoing assessment that he'd thought was settled and was finding it wasn't.
"Saturday mornings," Dumbledore said. "I think I have a few things to show you."
---
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