"Neville says he's seen Draco near the Room of Requirement twice in the past week," Harry said, at lunch. "Both times looking like he was trying not to be seen."
Kevin set his fork down and thought about this.
The Room of Requirement was, as far as most students were concerned, an empty classroom that Harry's training group had commandeered because Kevin knew someone and could arrange things. The core group knew what it actually was. Everyone else had no particular reason to think about it.
Which meant Draco's presence wasn't surveillance of the training sessions — he'd have no reason to be subtle about that, and besides, Kevin hadn't attended a single session this term. And it wasn't intelligence-gathering about Harry, because that didn't require the Room specifically.
Draco was looking for the Room itself. Or more precisely, for what was inside it.
Voldemort's given him a retrieval task.
Kevin had thought about this possibility since their conversation with Dumbledore about the Diadem. He'd been letting it develop. Watching rather than intervening. The timing now made sense: Draco had the assignment, was working it quietly, and Voldemort was presumably applying pressure from a distance.
"You think Draco's in trouble?" Ron asked. He was turning a piece of bread over in his hands with the focused attention of someone whose mind was somewhere else entirely. "Like, does he want us to help him?"
"He might." Kevin reached for his water. "But we can't go in directly. Not yet."
"What if it's not that complicated, though?" Ron said. Kevin looked at him, faintly surprised by the thoughtfulness of the approach. "I mean — the break was 'outside pressure made it impossible.' That was the cover story. Voldemort might actually believe we'd be willing to help Draco now, if he asked us. Like, we hate Voldemort, not Draco. Maybe we can use that."
Harry was staring at Ron.
Ron looked back at him. "What?"
"Nothing." Harry's voice was carefully neutral. "Nothing at all."
"I just hate seeing him like that," Ron said, in the tone of someone defending a position they're slightly embarrassed by. "He used to be a complete nightmare. I knew where I stood. Now he just looks — tired all the time."
Kevin felt something settle. He put his hand on Ron's shoulder briefly.
"I'll get Draco back this year," he said. "I promise."
Ron's expression did a complicated thing and then resolved into something simpler. He nodded.
"Here's how we play it," Kevin continued. "Don't acknowledge that you know what he's doing in the Room. Let him work the job. If he completes what Voldemort wants, it buys his family some breathing room, which makes the next step easier." He paused. "Snowdrift will keep an eye on things. If it turns dangerous, she'll step in."
"What's he actually looking for in there?" Hermione asked, in the tone of someone who already has a theory.
Kevin looked at her. "What do you know about the Room's storage function?"
She reached into her bag — producing a book with the practiced efficiency of a professional — and found a passage. The Room of Requirement, she explained, was not simply a space that reconfigured itself: it drew on a vast interior repository of stored objects, a centuries-old accumulation of items hidden, abandoned, or forgotten by generations of Hogwarts occupants. The Repository mode was accessible if you walked the corridor thinking specifically about needing to hide something, and what you created there persisted. Which meant the Room contained, quite possibly, objects of historical and magical significance that nobody alive had catalogued.
"Something specific got hidden in there," Kevin said. "Something from a while back, by someone who understood the Room well enough to use it deliberately. Draco knows what he's looking for. He just hasn't found it yet."
Harry and Ron exchanged a look.
"Can we go look?" Ron said.
"You don't know what you're looking for."
"We could look for the thing that looks like it shouldn't be there."
Kevin looked at Hermione. Hermione looked at Kevin.
"The Repository section is enormous," Hermione said. "Books suggest it contains thousands of objects accumulated over centuries. Finding a specific item without knowing what it looks like or where it's positioned would take—"
"Yeah, come on," Harry said to Ron, already standing.
They left at a near-run. Ron grabbed two chicken legs from his plate on the way out, for reasons known only to himself.
Hermione watched them go. She exhaled through her nose. Then she looked at Kevin.
"Are you going to stop them?"
"They won't find it." Kevin leaned back. "Harry might, eventually — he's got a connection to it that they don't. But not today. Let them poke around. It'll help them understand the scale of the problem."
Hermione pinched his side, firm and precise. The look she gave him translated, roughly, to: I cannot believe I am in love with someone this strategically comfortable with chaos.
Kevin grinned.
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The story does not stop here. It NEVER stopped. More chapters breathe and pulse beyond this page, ready to be unlocked. Do not let curiosity go unanswered.