The blue fire hit him like a wall of compressed summer.
Kevin had shifted into tiger form in the same motion, which helped — the full White Tiger form radiated its own thermal field, and the storm that came with it had always been more resilient to external heat sources than he'd expected. He still felt the blue fire. He felt it in a way that made him revise upward, for the third time in three minutes, whatever number he'd assigned to this man's power.
The dragon that had formed from the flames above him could have bitten a building in half. It held its position, looking down.
The old man walked through the fire without it touching him and stopped a few feet away. His voice, when it came, was quiet and almost gentle.
"Kevin. This doesn't have to happen."
"You lit me up the moment we met."
"To get your attention. You were moving fast and I needed you still." He glanced at Lucius and Narcissa, still levitated and unconscious beside Kevin. "I have a certain fondness for those two, actually. Genuine pure-blood conviction, even if their particular conviction led them somewhere unfortunate."
He shook his head. "A half-blood playing pure-blood messiah. Doesn't it strike you as absurd? All those people bowing down, and he's less pure-blooded than half of them."
Kevin shifted back to human form, keeping the tiger in reserve, and looked at him carefully.
"You're not here to fight for Voldemort," he said. "You're here in spite of him."
"I made a bargain I no longer wish to honour." The old man's tone was entirely even. "I'm dying. Slowly — but it's moving. And I find I can't spend what time remains watching purebloods prostrate themselves before a man who despises what he is." He held out his hand again. "Help me finish this properly. Work with me."
"I don't know who you are," Kevin said.
"Albus hasn't mentioned me?"
"Albus keeps his own counsel."
A small sound — not quite a laugh, but adjacent to one. "Yes. He does." The hand dropped. "You're more cautious than the reports suggested."
"I'm cautious about unknown entities in burning rooms."
"Fair."
The fire dragon shifted above them. Behind the old man, Kevin could already see the architecture of what was coming — three more dragons coalescing from the floor, large and purposeful, designed not to cage but to strike. The old man's posture changed, just fractionally, and that small change said: I've decided.
Kevin pulled the full storm up.
The White Tiger exploded back into being, thunder detonating in the enclosed space at a volume that should have been impossible indoors, the ceiling simply ceasing to exist under the pressure of the lightning strike. Three fire dragons met one tiger's claw and the exchange was enormous and extremely loud and the part of the manor directly above them stopped being part of the manor.
The old man was gone.
Apparition. Clean, instantaneous — through active Anti-Apparition wards that should have made it impossible.
Kevin registered this with the specific, focused attention he gave to things that required immediate filing under discuss with Dumbledore as soon as possible.
He had Lucius and Narcissa still secured. He had a half-demolished manor around him. He had, he verified quickly, blood in several places on his person — his own blast had not been kind to him despite the shielding. The Anti-Apparition wards had dropped in the explosion; he could feel it.
He pulled himself upright. Drank two vials of Dragon-Blood Healing Draught while his other hand maintained the levitation on both Malfoys. Felt the worst of the physical damage begin to close.
Then the blue fire returned.
Not from inside — from outside, rising from the earth, spreading inward. Three new fire dragons, larger than the ones before, finding the open space where the ceiling had been and entering it with a considered patience.
The wards snapped back up simultaneously.
The old man stepped through the flames he'd just created and stopped at what had been the doorway.
"Leaving already, Kevin?"
He had known. Of course he had known; there had never been a version of this where Kevin stayed to finish it. Grabbing Lucius and Narcissa and getting clear was the entire mission, and the old man had assessed that correctly from the start.
Kevin met his eyes across the fire.
"Tell Albus I said hello," the old man said.
"I don't know your name."
"He'll know." A pause. "And Kevin — you were right earlier. He will grieve you, if it comes to that."
Kevin gathered the storm.
Wind and lightning tore through the three new dragons in a sequence of decisive, concentrated strikes. The old man walked through the aftermath like it was morning drizzle. He didn't pursue. He simply watched, with an expression that contained something Kevin couldn't fully read — respect, possibly, and something older and more complicated underneath it.
The Anti-Apparition zone came apart under Kevin's focused attention, section by section, the way a wall comes apart if you know which stones are load-bearing. The White Tiger was gone before the last of the blue fire had settled.
The ruined manor site was quiet.
Most of the Death Eaters had died in Kevin's initial explosion. The survivors had burned in the blue fire that followed. The old man looked at what remained — scorched earth, collapsed stone, the skeletal bones of a building that had housed Voldemort's operations for the better part of a year — with the dispassion of someone inspecting something that had never mattered very much.
He had been working to turn those Death Eaters to his own thinking. Weeks of careful, patient effort. They were dead now.
He found he didn't particularly mind.
Getting old means watching things like this and feeling less and less, he thought. Or perhaps that's just me.
The clouds that Kevin's storm had summoned were still overhead. Rain began to fall — quiet, cold, the insistent English kind that settled in and stayed. The old man made no move to shield himself from it. He simply stood in the ruins of Malfoy Manor and let it fall on him, arms open slightly at his sides, face turned upward.
He had not felt rain in over forty years. Nurmengard had a roof.
He stood there for a long time.
Albus, he thought, with a quality of address that was neither prayer nor accusation. You'd have something to say about all this.
He let the rain answer for him.
The bridge at Hogwarts' main gate.
Harry, Ron, and Draco — the latter currently being enthusiastically restrained between the first two — were exactly where Kevin had expected to find them. Hermione stood slightly apart, watching the three of them with the expression of a responsible adult at a children's birthday party that has gotten mildly out of hand.
Kevin arrived. Lucius and Narcissa floated in beside him.
Hermione saw the blood and the ruined cloak before she saw anything else. She was already crossing the bridge.
"I'm fine," Kevin said, before she could speak.
"You are not—"
"The worst of it's already closed. Dragon-blood formula." He looked at her. "Both Grangers-level fine."
She exhaled. She checked him over with the focused efficiency of someone who had learned, over years, to distinguish between his fine meaning not dying and his fine meaning actually fine. She determined it was the former and decided, for now, to accept it.
She pinched his arm once, firm and deliberate.
"Ow—"
"That's for blowing yourself up."
"I was in the explosion—"
"You caused the explosion."
Draco had gone entirely still the moment he'd seen his parents. Harry and Ron, reading the room, stepped back.
Draco looked at them. At his mother's face. At his father's. At the state of both of them — unconscious, but breathing, unharmed.
He looked at Kevin.
"You're late," he said.
The words came out rough. The bitterness in them was complicated and thoroughly earned, and it also wasn't really bitterness at all.
"I had to redecorate the manor first," Kevin said. "Sue me."