Christmas Eve, 1998. Hermione Granger appears unexpectedly at the entrance to the Slytherin Common Room, and offers Draco Malfoy a gift.
This small act of goodwill sparks a friendship between them that stretches across three more Christmas Eves and one Christmas Day, as Draco learns to forgive himself and become a man who is, at last, able to accept her love.
Draco stared at her. He blinked, slowly and deliberately, but she did not disappear. “Are you… lost?” he asked when the silence between them began to grow uncomfortable, whilst hurriedly compiling a mental list of potions someone might have slipped him that would result in auditory and visual hallucinations of this nature.
To his astonishment, her eyes crinkled and her nose wrinkled and her lips curled up and she snickered. Hermione Granger, pursed-lipped, haughty-voiced swot extraordinaire, snickered a laugh.
“I’m almost sorry you’ll never know how funny that is, Malfoy.”
Before he could respond to that baffling statement—really, she was doing very little to dispel his suspicion that she was a figment conjured by his overwrought mind, he reflected crossly—she held out a parcel wrapped in silver paper and tied with a dark green bow. “Here,” she said, in a voice that suggested she was getting something over with. “This is for you.”
Draco took the parcel from her as a sort of reflex action. When someone offers you a gift the natural response is to take it, even if you then stare at it with utter bewilderment and a touch of fear, like you’re wondering if it might detonate.
Not that he truly thought it would, but… it wasn’t exactly outside the realm of possibility. He’d seen Granger in battle, he knew what she was capable of.
“Don’t worry, it’s not explosive,” she said, reading his mind in a deeply disconcerting way. “It’s a Christmas present. For you.”
“Why?” was all Draco could think to say.
She flushed, a soft rose-pink that tinted her lips and the tops of her cheeks and brightened the rich honey shade of her eyes. Draco felt his own eyes widen as he watched the colour rise, his mouth slightly open, staring as though he’d never seen her before.
Perhaps, in truth, he hadn’t.
darjeeling eyes by femme-écrivain. One-shot, complete. Rated T.