The forest swallowed them the moment they passed the treeline.
This far in, the paths Kevin had walked before didn't exist. The trees were old and enormous, their root systems raised and tangled, the ground between them a constant navigation problem. Ron muttered something under his breath every time he had to scale a root that came up to his hip. Harry kept one hand on his wand without appearing to think about it.
They were moving toward centaur territory. Kevin knew it by feel — the sound of the forest changing, the quality of the silence becoming more alert.
Hagrid stopped in front of a rise in the ground.
"Here we are, then."
They looked at the rise. It was large, irregular, and covered in dark fabric.
"That's not a hill," Harry said slowly.
"No," Kevin agreed.
"Grawp! Wake up! I've brought some friends!"
Hagrid reached out and patted the rise gently, the way you'd pat the shoulder of someone you were fond of and slightly afraid of simultaneously. There was a sound like a landslide deciding against itself. The rise shifted. An enormous hand came visible. Then a head.
Grawp uncurled from sleep with the slow deliberation of something that has never needed to move quickly because the concept of things being faster than it hadn't yet been introduced. He wobbled upright. Even sitting, he came to Hagrid's chest height. Standing, he made Hagrid look like a first-year student.
He looked down.
His face — broad, blunt, carrying some distant Hagrid family resemblance around the eyes — split into a grin of uncomplicated delight. He took one enormous step toward the small figures at his feet.
Then another.
"Uh, kids, this is Grawp, my—"
"Kevin." Harry did not run. He took several rapid steps sideways and positioned himself so that Kevin was between him and the oncoming giant. Ron did the same from the other side. Hermione was already behind Kevin, her hands on his shoulders, peering around him.
"Do something," Harry said, with great sincerity.
Grawp was six metres away and accelerating.
Kevin flicked his wand.
The ground between them erupted in colour — flowers, hundreds of them, blooming from the dark forest floor in spreading rings of yellow and blue and white. The petals gathered on their own, twisting upward, assembling themselves into a large, elaborately plumed bird that turned twice in the air and let out a clear, sweet call directly at eye level with Grawp.
Grawp stopped.
He stared at the flower-bird.
His expression underwent a profound transformation, from the focused interest of a large creature approaching small interesting things to the pure, unfettered attention of someone who has just seen the most wonderful thing in the world and cannot look away.
He reached for it. Slowly, carefully, his enormous hand hovering.
The bird landed on one extended finger.
Hagrid let out a breath that seemed to deflate him by about three inches. He put a hand over his chest.
Kevin turned to Harry. Harry was still braced for impact. Kevin gave him a look: relax. Harry visibly attempted this.
"Uncle Hagrid," Kevin said, turning back, "next time, a heads-up about what we're walking into. Basic courtesy."
"Yeah, yeah." Hagrid was watching Grawp with the soft, complicated expression of someone who loves something difficult and knows it. "He's gentle when he knows you. Just gets excited."
Hermione had released Kevin's shoulders and was now watching Grawp with professional curiosity. "You brought him back from the giant colony yourself?"
"Snuck him out." Hagrid's voice dropped. The guilt in it was old and settled. "Giants, they don't — they don't take kindly to the ones who're a bit slow. Who haven't come out full-grown like. He's a half-blood, see. Half giant, half — well. They bullied him something terrible." A pause. "I figured I could teach him. Civilise him. Give him a proper chance."
"Does Dumbledore know?" Harry asked.
Hagrid's eyes flickered to Kevin.
Kevin kept his face neutral and said nothing.
Hagrid read this — correctly — as assume so — and nodded once, slowly.
The flower-bird made another sound. Grawp's grip, in a moment of enthusiasm, tightened by a fraction.
Caw.
The bird gave a single, abrupt, betrayed screech. It went limp. Grawp froze — his whole body going still with the specific stillness of something that has just done something irreversible and understands this.
Kevin stepped forward.
"Grawp!" His voice was clear, direct, not unkind. "You killed it."
Grawp understood killed. His eyes, the size of dinner plates, went wide with something Kevin recognised: the particular distress of genuine remorse in an entity that hasn't yet developed the emotional architecture to process it.
Kevin waved his wand. New bird. Same song. It landed on Grawp's shoulder and turned its head.
Grawp reached for it slowly — and his grip closed again, the automatic, joyful squeeze of something that doesn't yet understand its own strength.
Caw. Dead.
Tears rolled off Grawp's face in a quantity that was physically impressive.
Hagrid made a sound. Kevin put a hand up: let it happen.
Third bird. This time, Kevin waited. He watched Grawp reach out — and pause. The hand opened. Stayed open. The bird hopped onto the palm and sat there, and Grawp stared at it with an expression of focused, terrified concentration, as though the effort of not closing his fingers was taking everything he had.
The bird chirped. Fluttered. Lifted off and circled his head, then settled back.
Grawp's face broke open.
Two more birds arrived from Kevin's wand, smaller, quicker, weaving around each other in looping spirals above Grawp's head. He watched them with perfect stillness. When one landed on his knee, his hand moved toward it — and stopped itself, and withdrew.
Kevin scrambled up onto a convenient root system, got himself roughly level with Grawp's shoulder, and ruffled the enormous head of hair once, brisk and warm.
"Good," he said. "That's it exactly."
Grawp made a sound like a small avalanche deciding to be pleased with itself.
He held out his palm — enormous, calloused, taking up most of Kevin's field of vision — and looked at Kevin with the expression of an invitation.
Kevin looked at the palm. He looked at what had happened to three flower-birds in the past five minutes. He stepped down from the root system instead.
Grawp's hand hung in the air for a moment. Then, remembering, it withdrew. Slowly. Carefully.
Kevin nodded.
"He's going to be fine," Kevin said to Hagrid, who was standing behind them looking as though he might cry himself. "It'll take time and patience. But he has a good heart. That's the hard part — the rest is just practice."
Hagrid grabbed him in a hug that compressed Kevin's ribcage in ways that were not medically ideal. Kevin endured it.
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