They walked back into the Gryffindor common room the following morning, hand in hand, arriving to find Harry heading out.
"Where did you two go last night? I looked everywhere."
He said it without preamble, looking between them, clearly having wanted to ask Kevin something yesterday and been unable to locate him.
"Curiosity gets you into trouble, Harry," Kevin said, clapping him on the shoulder with great seriousness.
Harry opened his mouth. Then he looked down at their hands. Then he looked up.
He went quiet for a moment. "You went off for some kind of — right. Okay."
He rolled his eyes — Kevin was increasingly the sort of person who cancelled on mates for romantic reasons, a trajectory that had started somewhere in third year — and then he did a small double-take.
"Hold on. Weren't you two already—"
"No," Kevin said. "Officially, as of last night."
"What?" Harry looked at Hermione. "Seriously? You weren't before?"
Hermione had gone red. She let go of Kevin's hand, covered her face with both palms, and walked briskly toward the girls' dormitory stairs.
Harry watched her go. "But you've been — you live next door to each other, you hold hands, you—"
"It's complicated," Kevin said, completely unbothered.
Harry stared at the staircase for another moment. The situation was, apparently, not as he had understood it to be. "Right. Okay." He filed that somewhere and moved on. "You asked her to the ball yet?"
"Yes."
"How'd you phrase it? I need to know."
Kevin turned. "You want to ask Ginny?"
"Yes. But I don't know where to start."
"Walk up to her. Say, will you go to the ball with me. That's it."
"That's it?"
"That is the complete method, yes."
"No lead-up, no—"
"Harry. Walk up. Say the words. Go."
Harry looked like a man who had been handed a gift and suspected a trap. Then he nodded once, turned on his heel, and walked off with the energy of someone who had decided to stop overthinking this.
Kevin watched him go and wondered briefly what Ron's plan was.
He'd probably be fine. Probably.
The pre-Christmas mood had settled over Hogwarts like the snow outside — thick, soft, and somewhat inescapable. Kevin and Hermione were staying at school this year, and they were far from alone. The Yule Ball had apparently inspired a significant portion of the student body to resolve several months of unspoken feeling in a very compressed timeframe.
The school officially discouraged relationships among students under sixteen. Most professors took the pragmatic view that monitoring teenage hearts was neither their department nor a winning strategy, and largely looked the other way, provided things remained within the bounds of what they could pretend not to see.
Snape did not share this philosophy.
He had been patrolling with the particular purposeful energy of someone who had found a project, and he was surprisingly good at it — he seemed to know exactly which broom cupboards and alcoves and quiet corridor sections had become popular, and his catch rate was remarkable. Over a dozen couples in the first week.
Kevin and Hermione he had passed in the corridor, taken one look at their linked hands, snorted with audible contempt, and kept walking.
Hermione had found herself, for the first time in recorded history, feeling something almost like gratitude toward Severus Snape.
The reason for his forbearance became clear two days later.
"You told him," Hermione said, in the tone of someone identifying the source of a problem.
Kevin had been in Snape's lab the previous afternoon, brewing a restorative batch of something, and had apparently mentioned, in passing, that he and Hermione were together. Snape had said nothing. He had then, over the following twenty-four hours, redoubled his patrol efforts with an enthusiasm that several sources attributed directly to this interaction.
"I just told him," Kevin said, looking slightly guilty. "I didn't think he'd—"
"You poked the bear with a very specific stick," Hermione said. "Harry and Ginny got caught yesterday. He was furious. He blamed your potion."
Kevin winced. He'd only wanted to share the news. He hadn't anticipated it triggering what amounted to a romantic crackdown across the entire school.
They were walking the corridor when Kevin switched topics.
"Did your dress arrive? I wrote to your parents a few weeks ago."
Hermione looked up. "You wrote to them? I wrote to them as well. No wonder mine didn't match the description exactly."
They'd both, independently, written to the Grangers. Kevin hadn't given specific details. Hermione had. The Grangers, working from both sets of instructions simultaneously, had produced something excellent.
"What's yours like?" he asked.
"Whatever the dress is," Hermione said, and her tone was a perfect mirror of every evasive non-answer he'd ever given her on anything.
Kevin stopped walking.
She walked two more steps, then turned back and looked at him with enormous satisfaction.
"Now you know how it feels," she said primly.
He crossed the distance between them, took her face in both hands, and kissed her once, thoroughly, right there in the corridor.
"There," he said. "Now I know what that tastes like." He stepped back, straightened his collar, and walked on.
Hermione stood completely still for a beat. Her face had gone from smug to — several other things, in rapid succession. She caught up with him at a near-run and hit him repeatedly on the arm.
He was absolutely laughing.
Christmas Eve arrived clear and cold.
Kevin checked himself in the dormitory mirror — deep blue trench coat over white shirt, the hem falling just below the knee, the cut precise and clean. The Grangers had excellent taste and a very good tailor.
Ron came in dressed and eyeing Kevin with the specific expression of a person who has been robbed of something they hadn't realised they wanted.
"How is yours that good?"
"Your family sent something and it looks fine," Kevin said.
"It doesn't look like that."
Harry arrived, and Ron's expression updated again.
"Why does Harry's look brilliant too?" He said it to the room, not expecting an answer.
Kevin patted Ron's shoulder. Some things were, simply, how they were.
Harry looked genuinely apologetic. Ron's family always dressed him in things with a decade on them. It wasn't anyone's fault. He patted Ron's back in turn.