Hermione came back to herself lying on a very white floor that was not the floor of the Hogwarts hospital wing.
She sat up. Reached for her wand — gone. Reached for magic — absent. The space around her was featureless and absolute.
Except for the bracelet on her wrist, which was whole.
She stood. The bracelet was warm. It pulled.
She ran.
The voices came as she went — fragments at first, like memories slipping through the wrong door. An unfamiliar couple arguing cheerfully about a Transfiguration spell. A declaration, short and serious and answered immediately. A panic in the night. A voice saying go, go now and meaning it.
She mapped it as she ran. Kevin's parents. The bracelet had held their memories as well as their souls. She was running through the evidence of their whole lives.
Then —
"Have you seen a toad? It's my friend's."
She stumbled. That was her voice. Years ago, barely eleven, in a train corridor.
"It'll turn up. Magical creatures always do." A boy's voice, cheerful and slightly smug.
More of them, tumbling over each other. She and Kevin, across five years. Their arguments and their apologies and the slow drift toward something neither of them had named until it named itself.
"Hermione. I love you."
Her own voice, breaking open with the particular happiness of someone who had been waiting for something so long they'd given up expecting it: "I love you too."
She was crying before she reached the flower field.
It was extraordinary. She didn't have time to think about that, and she ran toward the small house at its centre, and she called his name —
The door opened.
Two people she didn't know stepped out first, young and warm-faced and watching her with expressions she read without difficulty.
Then Kevin.
He was walking through the flowers toward her with that particular ease he always had — unhurried, sure of his footing, the faint curve of a smile already at his mouth.
She crashed into him.
She couldn't speak for a moment. Just held on, the way you held on when the alternative was falling. The relief of him being solid, being warm, being here — it knocked everything else flat.
He held her. Didn't rush her.
When she finally pulled back, she could breathe again. He explained it quickly — Grindelwald, the plan, the reason he hadn't been able to warn her. I'm sorry. It came together fast.
She exhaled. The anger that should have come with the relief was still somewhere behind it, not ready yet. She'd find it later.
She straightened.
Looked at the couple behind him.
She knew, of course. She'd been listening to their voices for the entire length of her run. She'd heard their whole story. Their faces matched what she'd heard — the dark-haired warmth of his father, the sharp-eyed brightness of his mother, both of them watching her with the particular focus of people who had been waiting for this specific introduction.
Her throat closed.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again.
Say something appropriate. Say something kind and composed and —
"Dad! Mum!" She said it louder than she meant to, her voice high and clear and entirely beyond her control. "I'm Kevin's — I'm his — I'm going to be his wife!"
Her face ignited.
Kevin went very still.
His mother made a sound of pure, immediate delight and covered the ground between them in about three steps, pulling Hermione into a hug that was warm enough to make the flower field feel redundant.
"Good girl," she said, very softly. "Thank you. He's yours now. You look after each other."
Over her shoulder, Kevin was scratching the back of his head with the expression of a man who was deeply moved and also acutely aware that he had just, in some intangible but definitive sense, become engaged.
His father clapped him on the shoulder.
Kevin thought: Hermione is going to be catastrophically embarrassed about this for the rest of her life.
He looked at her face, still red, still startled by herself.
He thought: Good.