They talked for a long time.
Kevin didn't have an exact sense of how long — time moved differently here, or didn't move in the conventional sense at all — but it felt like hours. The kind of hours that go fast because they're full.
His mother never let go of his hand. She had a particular quality of attention that Kevin recognised as the opposite of everything he'd been denied growing up — she looked at him like he was the most interesting thing in the room and like she'd missed years of watching him be interesting and was determined to catch up. It was occasionally overwhelming. He bore it.
His father listened to the stories with the unrestrained delight of a man receiving sports commentary about a game he'd been desperate to see. Every duel, every confrontation with Snape, every brewing disaster and unlikely triumph — Cade received them with raised eyebrows and poorly suppressed grins and the periodic observation that you're absolutely my son.
This earned him regular elbows from Vivienne. He appeared to find the elbows acceptable.
Kevin hadn't known what he expected. He'd spent years knowing they were gone without ever quite having the space to feel it — too busy, too occupied, the orphanage and then Hogwarts and then Hermione and then Voldemort filling every available corner. Now, sitting in this impossible little house in the space between living and dead, he found the missing piece of himself had been a different shape than he'd imagined.
Not a wound. Not an absence. Just a thing he'd needed that he hadn't had, and now had, briefly, against all probability.
When the conversation finally slowed, he asked the question that had been sitting at the back of his mind since the flower field.
"Why couldn't the bracelet bring you back? It should have worked. Dore all but said it."
His father stretched his legs out, considering. "I went first. Your mum was still alive — the bracelet had her soul fragment, same as it had mine. In theory, she could have attempted a resurrection. But she was eight months pregnant, being hunted, and she didn't know how." He paused. "And then she was gone too, and you were barely a few months old, and there was no one who knew what the bracelet could do."
"You don't blame yourself," Kevin said, to both of them.
"We did for a while," his mother said. "Somewhere between the first and second year of being here, we stopped."
She looked at him with clear eyes.
He stood up slowly.
"I have to go back," he said. "You know that."
Neither of them argued. His mother's face went through several things in quick succession — reluctance, pride, something vast and resigned that he understood without needing to name it.
His father stood and pulled him into a hug that lasted longer than most hugs, and said nothing, which was more than enough.
His mother wiped her face and got her chin up.
"Don't you dare come back here. Not for a very long time." She put her hands on either side of his face again. "Go and live well. That's all we want. That was always all we wanted."
He brushed her tears away with his thumb, and she batted his hand off, and he grinned.
Then, from outside — faint as breath, but unmistakable.
Kevin. Kevin.
Something in the sound of her voice made his chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the Killing Curse.
"Our daughter-in-law," his mother said, with a speed and brightness that was almost comic. She grabbed his father's arm. "Come on — I want to see her."
"Mum —"
But she was already pulling his father toward the door with the energetic propriety of a woman who had been waiting for this particular moment longer than anyone knew.
Kevin followed them out.
The flower field stretched in every direction, soft and endless. At its edge, where the white began again, a figure stood — the path of light from the bracelet still trailing from her hand, still pulling her forward.
She raised her eyes.
Kevin walked toward her through the flowers.
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Hey everyone! Things at work have gotten extremely hectic. I am in the middle of a major project with tight deadlines and my schedule for the next 10 days is completely packed from morning to night. I genuinely have no bandwidth to manage uploads properly during this period. As soon as this work sprint is over I'll be straight back to the regular upload schedule. Thank you so much for sticking around and being so supportive, it really does mean a lot! 🙏