This story was written for the Spring Forward with Draco and Hermione fic exchange. The requester wanted snark and snow…and I tried, honestly. The story would have been better as a poem, but it’s definitely worth a read. Kyra4 helped! Can anyone guess which little element was her suggestion?

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Draco gathered up a handful of snow and patted it into a solid ball. The cold sunk through his gloves, prickling his fingers to life. He threw the snowball as hard as he could, into the black. Heavy grey clouds had moved in and blocked the sky earlier that day. It would be the last snowstorm of the year. The lights from inside Hogwarts’ windows only reached so far. The glass was thick and cloudy and the night outside was dark.

He threw snowball after snowball, until he knew his arm would be sore the next day.

Hermione was in Professor McGonagall’s classroom, tending to the swallows that would be turned into music boxes. Of course, their cages were disgusting, and they made a terrible racket when Hermione tried to put them to sleep, but it was worth getting a bit of practice ahead of time. Not one of her music boxes would be warbling the next day.

Hermione reached into a cage and caught one particularly fat swallow. It chirped angrily. Hermione placed it on McGonagall’s desk, intending to give it a bit of a head start. And then, without any warning, the bird shat on the desk, on Professor McGonagall’s desk. Hermione stared at the little gooey thing in horror. The swallow made a mad rush for the window, heaving its unusually heavy body off the desk.

It flew surprisingly fast for such an overweight bird. And it flew right into the window.

Hermione cringed at the loud crack and then started toward the bird, but the window swung slowly open, just a few inches. The bird shook its head and then took off, into the pitch-black night. Hermione rushed the rest of the way to the window. She was only able to catch a glimpse of the swallow tumbling crookedly away. Her eyes wandered down to the white ground near the castle, the only thing she could see. There was a dark figure hunched in the snow, silent and unmoving.

Little snowflakes began to fall, making wide swirls on their trip down. Draco wondered if there was really anything he could have done. His father had gotten himself into jail. There was nothing Draco could have done to help that. He’d been at school, making sure Crabbe and Goyle passed their classes and Pansy didn’t start any bitch fights she couldn’t win. With such friends, in addition to school, Quidditch, and all the nasty looks Draco had been getting since his father had been incarcerated, Draco couldn’t have been expected to save a convicted Death Eater from execution.

If there was one thing Draco admired about his father, it was his almost inhuman ability to get whatever he wanted. Lucius had obtained wealth, power, and a full pardon from the Ministry of Magic – once. Surely Draco couldn’t have repeated such a miracle when his father had been unable.

Draco was sitting very still on a mound of snow. His lungs were filling up with painfully cold air but the rest of his body was hot. Waves of heat rolled through him when he thought of what had happened just a few days earlier.

There was movement in the corner of his eye. When he turned to look, he saw something he wanted very much, something he had wanted for what seemed a very long time. He had seen her, at the end of the last year, hugging Potter after yet another brush with Voldemort and yet another terrible loss. She had touched his face soothingly, searching his eyes to see what she could do, how she could fix things. Draco imagined her ink-stained hands to be soft and cool, sweet against the heat of his face.

She was walking out towards him. She should have been in silhouette; the light from the castle was behind her and it was so very dark outside, but she was glowing. Snowflakes swirled around her, settled on her hair, melted on her warm skin. Draco envied his father’s ability to get whatever he desired.

She was surprised to see him. “Are you…” she scrunched her eyebrows and squinted at him, “Are you crying?”

Draco marveled that he could detect some pity in her voice, even after all these years. He ran a gloved hand over his face. “You’re out late,” he said, standing up quickly.

“Well, McGonagall, I was…did you see a swallow? It’s just that it will probably freeze and…are you okay?” She had come out in a hurry, Draco realized. She hadn’t even put on a coat. He wondered what she would do if he held her close, kept her warm himself.

“Am I okay? Look at you. You’ll be lucky not to get frostbite. Top student in the school and you lack the common sense to put some gloves on. Here – ” and without allowing himself to think too hard about what he was doing, he scooped up a large, loose handful of snow and, with a few murmured words, transfigured the lot of it into a pair of soft, white mittens. “Put these on,” he said brusquely, shoving them toward her. “If word gets round to Potter and the Weasel that I stood by and let you freeze, they’ll be howling for my blood. I can really do without that, thanks.”

Hermione blinked slowly and pulled on the mittens. “Er… thanks, Malfoy. Well, I’ve got to get going.” She started walking again, her feet sinking into the snow with each step. She pulled her wand out of her robes and walked past him with a fleeting, curious look.

“What are you doing?” he asked, turning to watch her wander off into the dark.

She muttered something about a bird and Professor McGonagall, and then she spoke to her wand. Draco saw her wand glow blue and cold. She readjusted, pointing the wand in another direction, and it glowed red. Hermione started stomping off, away from Draco. He followed her.

“Wandering off alone in the middle of the night hardly seems typical Head Girl behavior.” Draco spoke from several paces behind her, watching her hair sway in the frigid wind.

“And you don’t seem the type to sit alone in the snow, freezing to death on a stormy night,” she answered over her shoulder. “Besides,” she added slowly, “I’m not alone.” Draco felt his insides grow warm, even with the cold air continuously chilling his lungs. All his snow gear was stifling.

“So why, exactly, do you feel compelled to rescue this bird?”

“I can’t let it die out here,” she said, shivering a little.

Draco pulled his coat off and quickened his pace until he was walking just beside her. He wanted very much to give it to her.

“Are you hot? It’s freezing out here!” Hermione shot a covetous glance at his coat.

“I’m not going to help you anymore. It’s your own fault you’re cold.”

“Why are you following me?” she asked, annoyed. They were obviously getting close to the bird for her wand grew even brighter, as if it were on fire. Draco suppressed an irrational urge to knock it out of her hand.

“I can do whatever I want, Granger.”

“Fine, but why would you want to follow me?” She kept glancing at him as she walked along. She expected him to throw a snowball or pull out his wand and hex her. Her teeth were chattering.

“How can you have gotten so cold in a matter of minutes?” Draco drawled.

“I told you! It’s freezing out here! I’m not like you Slytherins who can stand to sulk down in those chilly dungeons all year long, and I know I should have brought a coat, but I was in a hurry, so would you just lay off it?”

“Keep your knickers on, Granger,” Draco said, thrusting his coat at her. “If I’d known you would keep whinging, I would have lent it to you sooner.”

Hermione stopped walking. She stared at him, holding the coat as tightly as if it were a long-abused house-elf, and then shook her head in confusion. She put it on quickly, sighed warmly, and began walking again.

She hadn’t taken two steps before her wand sent off a few red and gold sparks and faded back to its original color. Draco could make out the small, dark shape of the bird on the snow. Hermione scooped it up in her hands and turned toward him, holding it out like an offering. “You see? The poor thing is so disoriented!” It flopped around a little, trying to get away. Hermione closed her hands around it.

“It’s more than disoriented. It looks like it’s got room temperature IQ.”

“As opposed to you, whose IQ has probably dropped to freezing after all your sitting around in the snow?”

Draco smiled at her, wondering whether she’d even see it in the gloom. Everything was so dark, except for her face above his coat. He could see the few freckles across her nose and the snowflakes caught in her eyelashes. “I already have a mother, thanks,” he said.

Hermione considered several snappy retorts, but after the execution of the previous weekend, they would all have been in bad taste. She turned away from him and started trudging back toward Hogwarts. They walked for a while in silence. “That was a Muggle phrase, you know.”

“What, the temperature thing? I never said I didn’t know about Muggles, Granger. I just never liked them.”

“You’re speaking in the past tense,” Hermione said hopefully.

“That’s wishful thinking.”

She stayed quiet for several minutes. The wind picked up and the snow started coming down thicker. “But how’d you even know about IQ tests?”

“Oh, you know, keep your enemies close and all that.”

They had nearly arrived at the castle. “Muggles are not your enemies.”

“House-elves do not deserve rights,” Draco said with equal decisiveness. He regretted saying it immediately. Her face closed off completely. She looked like one cold, hard, bitch of an ice queen and the thing was, Draco didn’t consider Muggles his enemies. How could he when Muggles had delivered this girl into his life? How could he when all he cared about was his friends and his father? It had just happened that Lucius’ enemies had been Muggles. And now that Lucius was gone, Draco supposed his enemy was the Ministry of Magic.

He did hate the Ministry, he would hurt them somehow, but the hot anger he had felt earlier that evening had been numbed by the wind.

They were at the school. “Give me back my coat,” Draco said. He liked seeing her in it. It looked better on her than it ever could on him.

She took it off too quickly. Her hair got caught on one of the buttons. He wanted to help, to touch that hair with his own fingers, but he was wearing gloves. He stood there and watched instead. She struggled with it for a few seconds and finally pulled loose. Draco was left with three strands strung around the button.

Hermione spent the next few months thinking about him.

He had been so mellowed by grief, though it hadn’t lasted till lessons the next day. Malfoy went back to his usual self, more or less. He still enjoyed infuriating Harry and Ron, and still exhibited a life-long assurance of his power over the Slytherins, but he stared at her. He didn’t seem angry, he didn’t seem interested in the war, and he didn’t call her mudblood. He would just stare, and occasionally speak to her the same way he had during the last snowstorm of the year. He was undeniably rude, but that was all Hermione could lay claim to.

And Merlin, the mittens. She’d kept them. They were so soft and sweet, a perfect model of transfiguration skills that even she couldn’t top. Over the months, they moved from her trunk, to underneath her pillow, to a constant residency in the pockets of her robes.

Hermione was completely embarrassed to think of it, but while spring was rolling around, she started to think of him in terms of Gone with the Wind. It was a very bad habit. It wasn’t that he was her Rhett. No, he was never charming with her. He simply had that appeal, that alluring promise of something deeper beneath the slow drawl and offhanded comments. Unfortunately, Hermione found herself stuck somewhere between Melanie and Scarlett. She was too optimistic to write Draco off as a scoundrel and too sharp to really believe he was anything else.

But all that changed at the very end of the year, in June, when something happened that Hermione never could have expected….

Most of the students were convinced hell had frozen over. It was snowing in the very late spring. Ridiculously enough, it was snowing in just one spot: the Astronomy tower. More than that, Draco Malfoy was the cause of it, and to top it all off – though only the most perceptive knew this – the reason behind it all was a full-blown attempt at romance.

And, as Head Girl, Hermione had to put a stop to it. She marched up the seven flights of stairs, panting and fuming as she reached the top. If there was one thing she hated, it was moving even one inch after she had just finished her N.E.W.T.s. But as she opened the door to the roof, there was Draco Malfoy, the object of countless daydreams and reason enough to climb any number of stairs.

He had charmed the sky above to sprinkle snow down around him. The flakes were moving languidly with the early summer breeze. The air held the scent of change, from winter to spring, spring to summer, snowstorms to warmth. Hermione had been waiting for something like this for an entire season and the tension of it filled her up. She had to wait just another moment.

He was amazingly calm, or at least he looked it. He was as still as he had been that night. The only movement was his cloak being lifted by the breeze and his hair, as white as the snow piling up around him. “Hermione.”

Something in her body crackled, like the first spark of a fire. “It looks like you’ve got your own little weather system.”

Draco held out his hand to her. “You’re going to melt it all away.” His face was inscrutable but his voice was warm and hopeful.

Hermione stepped through, into the snow with the distinct feeling she’d left normal life behind for something sweeter. Cold tickled her face, in the places where snowflakes landed. A warm breeze lifted her hair away from her neck. It was remarkable, the mix of cool and warm together. Hermione put her hand in his. He wasn’t wearing gloves, Hermione was glad to learn. His hand was strong and sure, comforting, and it circled around hers, securing her. He drew her close. “This is so strange,” she said, smiling into his dark, grey eyes.

“But it’s just what I want, always.” He kissed her, pulled her even closer and kissed her slowly. Hermione melted into the sensation. His mouth was cool and gentle, but she could feel something deeper waiting there, for another time.

Hermione pulled away and pressed her hand against his warm face, hoping none of the ink from her fingers would smudge. “Are you ready for a snowball fight?”