The Hogwarts Express pulled out of Hogsmeade station in a sigh of steam, and Kevin watched the castle recede through the window until the trees closed over it.
Hermione talked for most of Scotland.
She'd been storing things up — not just the academic observations she'd been parcelling out in the library, but the deeper inventory of her childhood, the stories she'd carried around for eleven years with no one to give them to. She talked about her parents' dental practice, about the particular social mechanics of being the only child who'd read the entire school library by age nine, about a specific incident in Year 4 involving a geography project and a classmate named Sophie that had ended a friendship Hermione hadn't quite realised she'd valued until it was gone.
Kevin listened. He asked the right questions — not the sympathetic ones that close a topic, but the lateral ones that open it. She kept talking.
She was also, at some point, leaning against him. This had happened gradually, incrementally, in the way that the distance between two people in a train compartment can close over an hour without either of them deciding to close it.
Kevin had been fiddling with her hair for twenty minutes before he fully registered he was doing it — working through a section of curls with the absent patience of someone who finds the activity soothing without particularly thinking about why. The hair was soft. It smelled like something pleasant that he didn't have a name for.
Hermione, mid-sentence about a summer holiday in Cornwall, leaned slightly further into his shoulder and didn't break her train of thought.
So comfy. Just like this.
She was still planning their entire holiday in detail — every place she wanted to show him, every activity, the schedule mapped out with Hermione's characteristic thoroughness. Kevin agreed to all of it without negotiation, because he had no preferences that outweighed hers on this particular subject and because her face when she was planning something she was excited about was one of his favourite things to look at.
He kept working through her hair. She kept talking.
The train pulled into King's Cross and they stepped onto the platform into the noise and movement of the ordinary world.
"Why," Hermione said after thirty seconds, "is everyone staring at me?"
Kevin looked at her hair.
He looked at the nearby commuters.
He looked at her hair again.
"Perhaps they find you striking," he said.
She narrowed her eyes.
"Hermione!" Her mother's voice cut across the crowd — a warm woman with eyes just like Hermione's and considerably better-managed hair, standing with a tall man who had the steady, well-organised look of someone who had been a dentist for long enough to apply those qualities to everything else in his life.
Hermione ran to them. Her mother caught her, drew back to look at her, and then looked at her hair with the specific expression of a parent trying very hard not to laugh.
"Your hair, sweetheart. It's... very..."
Hermione froze. Her hand went to her head. She turned.
Kevin was ten feet away, shaking with laughter that had gone mostly silent.
"Kevin!"
Her shriek was undignified. She dove back into her mother's arms and made small furious sounds.
Mrs. Granger laughed properly then. Mr. Granger, from behind his wife's shoulder, was also fighting a losing battle with his expression.
Kevin pulled himself together and walked over. "Mr. and Mrs. Granger. I'm sorry — first impressions and all. I couldn't help it."
"Kevin," Mrs. Granger said, releasing a mortified Hermione to look at him properly. "Hermione has mentioned you rather a lot."
"*I have not — Mom — *"
"All good things," Mr. Granger said dryly. He assessed Kevin with the look of a man who has heard a great many good things and is now doing his own evaluation. "She talks about you quite a bit."
"Dad —"
"Let's get in the car," Mr. Granger said, with the serenity of someone who has just established the relevant information and can move on.
The drive was easy. The Grangers asked the questions that parents ask — school, interests, plans — and Kevin answered them honestly and without the orphan card, which he was saving. He'd been mentioned apparently in enough of Hermione's letters that they knew the rough shape of him: the orphanage, the potions work, the troll corridor. That last one had clearly done considerable work on Mr. Granger's assessment of him, Kevin noticed.
Hermione had recovered enough during the drive to sit next to him and narrate points of interest with the determined dignity of someone reasserting competence after public humiliation.
When they arrived at the house, she showed him around. Every room she described, she also used as an opportunity to apply a firm, precise pinch to his ribs at the precise moment he seemed to be finding something funny.
"This is the garden," she said. Pinch.
"This is where we eat breakfast." Pinch.
"This is where I do my reading." Pinch. "And you are not allowed to criticise my organisation system."
Kevin had decided, by the fourth room, to simply keep moving quickly and accept that this was the form her forgiveness took.
Her parents watched from the kitchen doorway, laughing.
"She's never done that to anyone," Mrs. Granger said quietly to her husband.
Mr. Granger watched Kevin dodge around the corner of the living room and decided that his daughter's first proper friend was, on balance, a good thing. "He seems solid."
"He kept her safe." Mrs. Granger said this as though it settled everything, which for her it largely did.
Later, showing Kevin to the guest room, Mrs. Granger paused in the doorway and said, with the casual clarity of someone establishing ground rules: "Behave yourself, Kevin."
Kevin looked at her. "She's twelve," he said.
"Mmm." Mrs. Granger smiled in a way that didn't entirely match the word. "Sleep well."
Downstairs, Mr. Granger caught Kevin on the way to the kitchen for water, waited until they were eye to eye, and delivered a single slow nod that communicated several things without any of them needing to be spoken.
Kevin nodded back.
Understood, his nod said. Completely.
He went to bed and lay awake for a while thinking about how twelve-year-olds were not as simple as they looked.