Kevin had let go of Su to sip merrily at his drink, and then listened attentively to what Kingsley was saying. They were here on business, after all, not pleasure - though he was definitely having fun while taking care of important things. He sobered, however, and set his drink aside when the book appeared.
Of course he was going to be careful of a book. Kevin respected books immensely - he had gone to great lengths to protect them while he was on the run, more than most of his other belongings. Protect them, and keep them with him. Kingsley could definitely trust him with a book.
That wasn't the only thing Kingsley meant, though. He could see the glance at their drinks, and wiped his hands on a napkin before reaching for the book. He took it respectfully, and opened it carefully, feeling as though the pages might crumble under his fingertips.
He leaned in to look more closely at what he saw inside. Paper clippings, dated from when Kevin was just a kid. He wanted to read each of them closely, but for now just skimmed the titles and looked at the accompanying pictures to get a general gist. He turned a few pages, and felt like he was beginning to see a pattern, but couldn't quite put his finger on it. "Wow," he said. "You made this?"
If nothing else, this kind of dedication to keeping a record was impressive. But there were things in it that were important, too. Disappearances, deaths, and certain things that didn't quite seem to fit, but Kevin thought he saw the logic behind having them in here with the rest.
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Su had been listening to Kingsley speak, but she'd been paying attention to other things, too. Her eyes sharpened as she felt him cast that spell and she cocked her head slightly, eying him with a smile tugging at her lips. That had been brilliantly done really, silent and with no motion to give it away. She was almost envious. Certainly she wanted to sit him down and make him tell her exactly how he'd done it, but now wasn't the time for that.
Following suit with Kevin at Kingsley's look (weirdly, it had reminded her of the looks her parents used to give, pointed and telling without them needing to speak- and that made her miss them again for a brief moment), Su dried her hands on a napkin before resting her chin on Kevin's shoulder to look down at the book with him. It was certainly impressive, and her Ravenclaw mind was already sorting through patterns and finding the similarities and differences between articles, but Su couldn't help but ask, "So what is all of this, then?"
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That was a particularly noteworthy scrapbook - important in showing what had happened, how it happened, that it even had been happening. The signs had all been there, if one recognized the patterns. Some of the others, such as who wrote in to the agony aunt over the years (including one woman’s seven failed relationships in exquisite detail, though she never signed the same name twice), where not truly important in a historical point of view. Or the current politics.
Very few people had actually seen them, the insides, and Kingsley trusted almost no one with them. But he also couldn’t risk losing them altogether. It was too much work and too important. It was easier to see patterns when they were laid out in plain sight, but it was still not always immediately apparent to everyone, Kings had found in experience, why some articles were there.
“I did,” Kingsley confirmed, “I started pulling the articles together before I heard Potter’s claims.” He held his nearly empty pint, slowly turning it in his hand. “I’ve been organizing and making these scrapbooks from before the first war,” he explained, “before I went to Hogwarts.” Some of the early ones were a bit messier, not as clear cut of threads of thought. But everything was added the day the newspaper was printed.