Title: Let It Snow
Author: evildamsel/ScarletDeva/Irina
Rating: PG
Word Count: 785
Notes/Warning: Written for the Christmas Challenge at dramionedrabble. My quote was: “I almost wish there weren't a holiday season. I know nobody likes me. Why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?” - Charlie Brown's Christmas
The snow drifted to the ground in soft, lacy puffs. If Hermione squinted just a little, it looked like tiny crumpled handkerchiefs. Perfectly, painfully white.
Behind her, the house of the Noble and Ancient House of Black resembled nothing so little as itself. It was polished, the floors shiny and the walls warmed by floating candle sconces and the rounded splashes of verdant wreaths dotted with the crimson of the poinsettias that Mrs. Weasley pinned between them. Music from an old gramophone, an even older Frank Sinatra record, drifted through the room, broken into a different kind of melody by the chatter and laughter of family and friends.
The table Harry and Ron dragged from the kitchen, huffing all the way, had been enlarged and set with what Mrs. Weasley considered the minimum for a holiday spread. Fat ivory candles gleamed between platters of meat, potatoes and many, many sides.
But the main attraction was the insanely, as Hermione privately thought, oversized tree, decked out in a bizarre mishmash of elegant, antique ornaments and bright, clunky toys. The pile of wrapped gifts next to it was just as extravagant.
But she was quite finished with what was inside. Because outside the snow continued to fall and there was only one lonely light glowing out from a half-broken street-lamp.
And Draco Malfoy, platinum hair glimmering in night, was holding up one mittened hand and letting the snowflakes gather in his palm.
No one noticed when Hermione stuffed her feet into Ron’s big snow-boots. Or when she tugged on Harry’s large, puffy coat. Or when she tucked her own scarf around her head and into her coat. And finally, not even when she slipped outside, her feet sinking into the soft blanket covering the ground.
The wind was dead, the snow coating everything into a silence that felt almost sacred.
She felt like a blasphemer as she approached the naked-headed wizard, like she was committing a sin as he turned his gray eyes on her, somehow hearing her despite her effort to tread ever so lightly.
“Hi,” she said but let no sound pass her lips, only forming the words and barely breathing them out. She wondered if this was what being inside a snow-globe was like, the bits of white melting on her cheeks in a zing of hot-cold, everything outside of the wavering radius of the street-light simply non-existent.
He stared at her for a moment, almost as if he was just as caught by the hallowed atmosphere as she was. But then he broke it. “What do you want Granger? Go back inside and have fun with your little friends?”
She shrugged. “You’re here,” she explained. Or didn’t really but he’d have to take what he could get and that was all she was giving.
He frowned, forming ridges that crossed his marble-smooth forehead. “Yeah well, I didn’t ask for company. Go away. Go drink your stupid eggnog and eat your stupid roast and laugh with stupid Pothead and stupid Weasel.”
She smiled. His lower lip was almost sticking out into an almost pout and a snowflake landed and melted right on top of it. “I think I’ll stay.”
It was no longer a scene from a magic fairytale book. No reverent hands held onto a glass ball and no eager eyes watched the pale bits flutter in the air.
Instead it was just a boy and a girl outside under the night sky.
“Nope. I definitely think I’ll stay.”
He huffed, his shoulders hunched under a coat that wasn’t his, and turned away.
The silence fell back between them like a velvet curtain.
“You should go back in,” he broke it again, this time quietly. “They’re going to worry. They like you… for some reason I can’t even remotely fathom. ” The last was added on quickly, in a rush of angry words climbing over each other.
And she didn’t believe it.
What she heard instead was something else. They like you, but they definitely don’t like me.
So she said nothing.
Instead, she stepped closer and reached a pale, slightly shaky hand up to his head, stretching onto her toes to breach the distance in their heights, and brushed off the fluff of snowflakes lingering on his blond hair like milky opals set in a pale-gold cap.
His head whipped back, his eyes wide, but she said nothing yet again. At least nothing with words. Her slim, chilled fingers found the warm fuzz of his mittened hand and slid right in, squeezing just hard enough to make themselves felt.
For a moment, she got nothing back.
But then… Then he squeezed back.
And they watched the silvery specks fall all around them.