"Professor. You're back."
Everyone scrambled to their feet the moment Dumbledore walked through the door.
They'd known he'd gone after Voldemort. Knowing it, and not fearing it, were two different things entirely — and every face in the room had spent the last few hours quietly doing the maths on how that confrontation might have ended.
Kevin studied Dumbledore from across the room. Not a speck of dust on him. Robes pristine. That faint, infuriating half-smile sitting exactly where it always sat.
He glanced down at himself. Ripped cloak. Singed sleeve. A bruise along his jaw that hadn't decided whether it wanted to hurt yet.
"Kevin." Dumbledore's eyes moved over him with something that might have been amusement. "It looks rather as though you crawled through a dragon's den."
"If it were just a dragon's den, I'd look a lot better."
Kevin opened his mouth to launch into the full account — but three sharp cries cut him off.
Everyone spun.
Draco and his parents had gone rigid simultaneously, their faces twisting with pain. Lucius and Narcissa jolted upright in their seats. Draco dropped to his knees, one hand pressed against his chest.
"Draco!" Harry and Ron were across the room in an instant, crouching beside him. "Can you hear us? What's happening?"
Draco didn't answer.
Kevin pushed forward and crouched in front of him, scanning him quickly. He already knew what it was. Voldemort's curse had activated — the one coiled in Draco's heart like a sleeping snake. And the moment it struck, it ran straight into the counter-curse Kevin had seeded there at their very first meeting.
He could feel it in his own chest, faint and distant: the two curses pressing against each other, grinding like millstones.
His was winning.
Voldemort had come home to find his base reduced to rubble. Rage had done what rage always does — made him reach for the cruelest lever he could find. He'd tried to activate his curses and kill every loose end at once.
It wasn't going to work.
A full minute passed. Slowly, the pain retreated. Kevin let out a measured breath.
Draco was drenched in sweat, one knee still on the floor. The colour had drained from his face completely — not just from the agony, but from the sheer drain of it. Voldemort's curse hadn't just attacked. It had pulled.
Harry and Ron got him upright between them, steadying him.
"Here." Kevin pressed a small vial into Draco's hand. "Invigoration Draught. Drink it."
Draco stared at it for a moment. Then he drank.
"Voldemort's curse is gone now," Kevin said. "He can't reach you through it anymore."
He kept his voice even, matter-of-fact. Then, patiently, he explained what had actually happened — the counter-curse placed at their first meeting, what it was designed to do, why it had cost Draco so much energy just now.
That was the moment Draco fully understood. The thing Kevin had put on him back then — the one he'd spent weeks quietly resenting — it had been a shield wearing a curse's face.
He was quiet for a long moment.
"Thank you," he said at last. No performance, no Malfoy posturing. Just those two words, stripped clean.
Kevin waved it off. "Tell your father to sort me out with some Galleons."
The warmth in Draco's expression died instantly. He stared at Kevin with something between betrayal and exhaustion.
"..."
Kevin gave a few brisk instructions — Draco needed the hospital wing, rest, food, and about three days of doing absolutely nothing. Harry and the others stayed to see the Malfoys settled. Kevin walked with Dumbledore.
There was something they needed to discuss.
Whoever that old man was, he hadn't just come out of nowhere. Power like that left a mark on the world. Someone would know him.
They reached the headmaster's office quickly. On the way, Dumbledore recounted his own evening in a few precise sentences: Voldemort had followed him into the cave. Dumbledore had trapped them both inside — no exit, no outside interference. Just the two of them in a sealed space while a significant portion of the cliff slowly ceased to exist. In the chaos, Voldemort had found a gap and slipped through it.
Apparently, Voldemort had noticed Kevin's absence almost immediately. Had correctly deduced he'd been drawn off elsewhere. And had remained — Dumbledore's voice was careful and neutral here — entirely composed about it.
Kevin thought of the old man at Malfoy Manor. Of the way he'd moved. The way he'd spoken.
Yes, he thought. That tracks.
He went through his own account then. Step by step, from the moment he'd blasted through the Manor's front gate to the moment he'd fought his way out. He described the old man in detail. The blue flames that couldn't be controlled or redirected. The way he'd broken the Anti-Apparition wards as though they were a mild inconvenience. The parting message: Tell Dumbledore I said hello.
Dumbledore's expression changed at that. Something shifted behind his eyes — heavy and old and complicated. He pressed his fingers to his temples.
"Is everything all right, Headmaster?" Kevin asked. "You know him."
It wasn't a question.
"I..." Dumbledore was quiet for a long moment. "I am not certain yet."
He was already moving. A quick letter, not even sealed — it burst into blue flame the moment he finished writing, gone before Kevin could read the address. Then Dumbledore turned, gathered himself, and simply vanished from the centre of his own office.
Kevin stood there for a moment, staring at the empty space.
He thought about the Anti-Apparition charms layered over Hogwarts. The ones that were supposedly impossible to break.
He thought about the old man at Malfoy Manor.
Right, he thought. Of course.