The last night comes the way last nights always do — announced for weeks, anticipated, and then suddenly here, quieter than you expected, with less ceremony than you prepared for.
N.E.W.T.s were done. Two weeks of examinations, and now nothing left to do but wait for results that would arrive when they arrived. Tonight was simply tonight.
Harry lay on his back in the dark, staring up at the bed curtains.
He'd expected something more. A roaring party, perhaps — the kind they'd had after the final battle, where the relief was so enormous it translated directly into noise. Instead, the evening had wound down gently: stories, laughter, a round of increasingly improbable reminiscences, and then sleep. Ron's snoring had begun within ten minutes. Everyone else followed.
Harry stayed awake.
The room had the specific quality of stillness that comes just before something ends. He looked at the empty bed across from him — Kevin's, which had been empty since the start of term, because professors slept in their offices now, because that was the shape Kevin's life had taken. Neat and inevitable.
Eventually, Harry got up.
He made his way through the darkened corridors in his pyjamas, the castle quiet around him in the way it always was late at night — the portraits still, the suits of armour patient, the staircases for once cooperating. He found Kevin's office by the light under the door.
He knocked.
Kevin jumped slightly, turned from the bookshelf he'd been sorting, and waved the door open with his wand.
"Harry. It's past midnight."
"Couldn't sleep. Saw your light."
Harry pocketed his wand and settled onto the sofa as though he lived there, which he felt he had some claim to, given the years.
Kevin went back to packing. "If Snape catches you wandering—"
"Tomorrow I graduate. He can't put me in detention the night before."
Harry glanced around the room. The new door in the far wall — the bedroom Hermione had furnished with the accumulated considered choices of several weekends — the bookshelves in their careful order, the desk with its organised surface. The small things scattered here and there that he recognised as Hermione's touches.
"You don't have to stay on campus over the holidays though, right?" Harry said.
"Not yet. Neville's been logging more time in the greenhouses than me — some of his plants don't observe the school calendar. But neither of us is on a mandatory rotation until we take on more responsibility." Kevin set a stack of books on the desk and turned. "Why?"
Harry shook his head. "Just thinking."
Kevin looked at him.
"What."
"I don't know. After this, you're here. I'm at the Ministry. Ron's at the Ministry. It's—"
"It's how it should be," Kevin said, simply.
Harry was quiet for a moment. Then he let it go, because Kevin was right, and because the night was too short to spend dwelling on the shape of things they hadn't lost yet.
He moved on. Ginny. The kiss. The date they'd had, the ones they hadn't yet. His persistent inability to be the one to close the distance first.
Kevin's eyes opened.
"Harry," he said. "One favour. Once. After that you're on your own."
"What are you—"
"Get up. You look fine. Don't overthink it."
He was out the door before Harry could finish the question.
Kevin knocked on Hermione and Ginny's door with two knuckles, unhurried.
The talking inside stopped. Light footsteps, then the door opened. Hermione in the gap, Ginny just behind. Both awake, both reading him immediately.
"Kevin—" Hermione's expression shifted to suspicion before she'd finished his name.
"Ginny," Kevin said, looking past Hermione with his most serene smile. "Harry's asking for you."
Ginny went very still.
Hermione took a breath to say something.
Kevin pulled her forward and covered her mouth.
"Mmph—"
"Hermione and I should catch up," he said pleasantly, over the muffled protests. "Take your time, Ginny."
Ginny stood in the corridor and went through a brief, visible sequence of emotions — surprise, realisation, resolve. She nodded once to herself. This is it. Don't miss it.
She walked to Harry's door and knocked.
"G-Ginny? What—" Harry's voice, startled and entirely unguarded.
Through the closing door, just before it shut, Kevin saw Harry's eyes find him across the corridor — Kevin's thumb raised.
Go on, then.
The door clicked.
Kevin walked Hermione backward into the room, let the door swing shut behind him.
She stopped fighting almost immediately. Turned to face him with the specific glare that meant she was half-annoyed and had already decided to forgive him, which were conditions he considered acceptable.
He let go.
She looked at him for a moment. "Pervert," she said at last, very quietly, and her mouth was doing something it wasn't supposed to do if she was genuinely cross.
Kevin said nothing. He picked her up — properly, carefully, one arm under her knees — and she made a small startled sound and grabbed his collar.
"What on earth are you—"
He kissed her cheek. She went still. Her grip tightened slightly.
He kissed her again, just beside her mouth. She was watching him with dark eyes and her lower lip caught between her teeth, and the glow of the lamp caught her hair, and it occurred to Kevin that this was the last night of being students together, and tomorrow everything would be different in ways neither of them could fully predict, and he was glad — enormously, quietly glad — that she was here.
He leaned in.
The next morning, Ron and Draco surfaced first, finding two doors still closed on the landing.
Ron tried Harry's. Locked.
He rattled it. "Harry! Up! Why've you locked it?"
A pause. "We'll be down in a minute."
Draco raised an eyebrow. "We?"
They headed to breakfast, Dobby's magnificent spread waiting for them, and it wasn't until they were halfway through their plates that the other door had still been entirely silent all morning.
Harry came down the stairs first, quiet. Kevin appeared from the next room at precisely the same moment.
Their eyes met. Both retreated half a step. Then Hermione and Ginny came out together, not quite in a hurry.
The four of them descended to the kitchen with the careful, deliberate normality of people with nothing to explain, and Crookshanks watched them from the top of the refrigerator with an expression of weary omniscience.
Breakfast was excellent. Nobody said a word about it. They were, all four of them, having a very good morning.
Mid-morning, the explosion shook the eighth floor.
Black smoke rolled from the windows of Kevin's office. Draco and Ron, who had gone back upstairs to get their things, reappeared on the landing at a run.
"Kevin's office — again?"
"It has happened before," Draco said, which was technically true and not helpful.
From inside the smoke, the sound of Kevin saying something unprintable.
Ron threw open the door. The office was in the condition of a potions demonstration that had made, at some point, an irreversible decision. Kevin stood in the middle of it, slightly singed, holding a beaker that was doing something inadvisable.
"Morning," Kevin said.
"Were you experimenting on graduation morning?"
"I was almost done."
Draco stared at him. "You couldn't wait one day."
"It was almost done."
Hermione, who had heard the explosion from downstairs and arrived with the specific expression she reserved for the fifth or sixth time something had happened, stood in the doorway with her arms crossed.
"Almost done" had a different meaning here than in ordinary life. She'd learned this.
Kevin had the good sense to look at least slightly apologetic.