(Author's note: I only found out later that Patronus and Animagus forms can be linked. By then the goldfish was already in, so — goldfish it is.)
Hermione set her quill down very carefully on the bench.
"What do you mean, you've already learned it?"
She'd researched the Animagus transformation herself, as she researched everything — thoroughly, methodically, cross-referencing four different sources until she was confident she understood all of it. The preparation phase alone was brutal. A mandrake leaf held in the mouth for a full calendar month. No swallowing. No spitting. No cheating, no shortcuts, not so much as a sneeze, or the whole process reset and you started over. She spent every day with Kevin. She knew his mannerisms, his habits, his small fidgets and tells. There was no possible way he had spent an entire month with a mandrake leaf in his mouth without her noticing.
"When did you learn it?" she asked. Then, with more emphasis: "How."
Kevin chose his words with the care of someone walking carefully across potentially unstable ground.
"Technically... end of third year."
He walked her through it — the extreme difficulty of the magic, the reason he hadn't wanted to announce it while he was still fumbling through the process, the way he'd convinced himself it was safer not to mention it until he was certain. He'd been inspired, he said, by hearing about Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew and James Potter, the unregistered Animagi of the previous generation. He'd found it extraordinary — and had quietly gone and taught himself the same thing, which he now acknowledged had probably not been his most cautious decision.
He'd been worried, he admitted, about her reaction.
He'd had reason to be.
Hermione pressed two fingers firmly against her left temple. She stayed very still for a moment, processing.
It tracked. She hated to admit it, but it tracked completely. This was exactly the kind of thing Kevin did — found something dangerous and fascinating, pursued it alone for months, succeeded, and then kept it to himself because he'd correctly predicted that telling her would result in an argument. She couldn't even be fully angry, because his logic was, unfortunately, not entirely wrong.
"Did you register it with the Ministry?"
Kevin's expression answered that before his mouth did. "No."
She pressed her second finger to her temple as well.
Unregistered Animagus. Another item for the list of laws Kevin was quietly breaking. At this rate, by the time they were done with Voldemort, he would either have a full pardon or an entire wing of Azkaban named after him.
"Once the Ministry has to publicly accept that Voldemort is back and we're all working together," Kevin said, reading her face accurately, "I'll register. Promise." He reached over and patted her head once, which was not the reassurance she'd been hoping for but was, she supposed, something.
She let out a slow breath and decided to defer the argument. "Alright. Fine." She looked at him with genuine curiosity. "What's your form?"
Kevin glanced at the door, then the window, checking both were secure. He cast a Barrier Charm around the room himself — thoroughness apparently being one of his virtues when it suited him — and then turned back to face her.
He shifted.
The large white cat that appeared in front of her was, at first glance, something like a very big housecat with an unusual coat — pale white with soft tiger-stripe markings, roughly twice the size of Crookshanks. It sat there looking up at her with vivid, attentive eyes.
Hermione stared.
Then she reached out and ran her fingers through its fur.
Oh.
It was incredibly soft. Dense and warm and unbelievably smooth, the kind of texture that made your hand want to keep moving. She scooped it up without thinking, pressed her face into the scruff of its neck, and breathed in.
"Oh, you gorgeous thing," she said, muffled by fur.
Kevin did not appreciate being called a gorgeous thing. His tail whipped once through the air, leaving a brief trail of luminous characters hanging in the space beside her:
If you'd known earlier, you'd have pet me bald by now.
"Absolutely not. I would have taken excellent care of you." She pulled back, looked him in the face — those sharp, watchful eyes — and pinched his fuzzy cheek, laughing. Then she leaned in and kissed the top of his head, the way you'd kiss a particularly beloved cat.
Kevin went very still.
From his current vantage point, a human face approaching at speed with that particular look of fond hunger was genuinely alarming. He was beginning to understand, with new and uncomfortable clarity, why cats were so frequently displeased by affection.
He bore it with dignity.
This is not a normal housecat, his tail wrote, after a moment. I should mention. It's a magical creature.
"That explains why you're so much larger than average." She was still petting him, scratching carefully behind his ears, discovering that this produced a response he was visibly trying to suppress. "What kind?"
Tiger.
She stopped scratching. Her hands stayed in his fur, but her eyes went wide.
"A tiger?"
This is just the normal form. There's a full form as well.
He stretched out comfortably across her lap. She was warm and the bench was drafty and he saw no reason to move.
"Can you do the full form now?"
Not here. Too large. And up close, the thunderstorm is — it would probably hurt you.
"Thunderstorm?" Her curiosity shifted into something sharper, more focused. "Kevin."
His tail drew a small, lazy arc through the air and then was still.
He had said what he intended to say.
He rolled onto his back in her lap, stretched all four paws toward the ceiling in a magnificent display of absolute comfort, and purred.
Hermione looked down at the enormous white cat draped across her legs with an expression of someone who has completely lost the thread of the argument they'd been planning to have.
She scratched his chin.
He purred louder.
"Kevin! The alchemy project's finished — Dumbledore sent the Communication Alchemy Badges!"
A month later. Harry burst through the workroom door with a badge in his hand, barely out of breath, grinning.
"Finally. Good." Kevin was already setting down his current work. "Swap yours out for the older prototypes, but keep those — they've still got a direct line between just us. Different range and encryption."
"I'm keeping mine regardless," Ron announced from the doorway. "I bled for that thing. Literally."
"Blood-recognition technology," Kevin said. "It's not a design flaw, it's a feature."
"It's a bug that bites—"
"Ron."
"—yeah, alright."
Harry waited for the laughter to die down, then turned to Kevin with the question he'd actually come to ask. "With the alchemy wrapped up — what's next for you?"
Kevin had been absent from the advanced training sessions for most of the month. The group had kept going without him — Harry managing it, Cedric helping run the physical work — but everyone had felt the absence of Kevin's particular brand of terrifying, casually devastating input.
"Draco," Kevin said. "His situation, and his parents. You've all heard the summary — someone has to actually do something about it, and I'm in the best position."
He'd briefed the group on Rita's findings the previous week. They understood the problem. They just hadn't had an angle.
Ron scratched the side of his head. "Right, but — Draco's curse. I mean, you just... sit down and unravel it? Like unpicking a knot?"
"Dark curses aren't like a bad spell you can counter and move on from. They're persistent, layered, sometimes deliberately trapped. Especially Voldemort's." Kevin leaned back in his chair. "Standard approaches are useless. You might as well try to unpick a tripwire with your eyes closed."
He paused, letting Ron absorb that.
"So instead of breaking it the normal way, I'm building a counter-framework. A curse that targets other curses. Attacks the mechanism directly rather than fighting the effect."
Everyone absorbed this in silence for a moment.
"You're going to curse the curse," Harry said finally.
"Essentially."
A beat.
"That," said Neville, who had appeared at some point from the back of the room where no one had noticed him, "is either the cleverest thing I've ever heard or a complete disaster waiting to happen."
"Could be both," Kevin said cheerfully. "Those aren't mutually exclusive."
----
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