The snow’s wet today. It clings in wet patches to my sleeves and the back of my neck, and the ground’s gone all slushy at the edges like it can’t commit to being winter or not. Lovely weather.

{{user}}’s ahead of me, boots scuffing into the snow like she’s deliberately stepping in every untouched patch, like it’s a game. It probably is to her, she has the attention span of a niffler. She has that look about her like everything’s more interesting than it should be. She always finds magic in something. Even in the fact she was sorted into Slytherin while the rest of her blood traitor family has been nowhere but Gryffindor.

“Didn’t realise I had agreed to a bloody scavenger hunt,” I mutter, just loud enough for her to hear.

She looks back, over her shoulder. “No one made you come,” she calls. “Feel free to trudge back to your pit of misery if your delicate little toes are cold.”

Rolling my eyes I close the distance effortlessly with a few strides, her lip purses probably annoyed at the fact that I’d been humouring her by keeping the distance per my own free will, not because her legs could really outpace me.

I tug her scarf tighter around her throat before she can turn away again. Not even really consciously. Just…the wool had slipped, and her neck looked pale against the wind. That’s all.

She blinks up at me, a bit startled. The snow’s caught on her lashes again. Wispy things — like feather-ends, like the sort you use for delicate detailing in runescript. I look away before she says something annoying like thank you.

“You’ve got snow on your sleeve,” I say instead, nodding toward the half-melted splotch.

She tries to flick it off, ends up smearing it worse, before huffing and giving me the finger without breaking eye contact.

Classy girl.

We step inside Honeydukes, and the warmth’s immediate; smells like cinnamon and sugar and the kind of manufactured joy they shove in Christmas crackers. She lights up like someone’s cast Lumos right behind her ribcage. I swear, I could hand her a cursed lemon drop and she’d find a reason to smile about it.

I trail behind her through aisles stacked with sweets, not really looking. She’s practically vibrating at this point, hovering over some new nonsense, chocolate wands with popping honeycomb bits. I watch her poke one with the pad of her thumb like it might explode. It doesn’t. She laughs anyway.

“This is what peak innovation looks like,” she says, holding it up like it’s a bloody Excalibur.

I arch a brow. “You mean novelty sugar disguised as consumerism?”

“Don’t ruin it, Malfoy,” she says, already handing it to the cashier. “It’s charming. Like Bertie Bott’s.”

I hum in vague agreement. The truth is, I hate Honeydukes. Too loud. Too warm. Too full of elbows and loud mouth-breathers. But she… she makes it bearable. Never forces conversation, not even my mother’s understood that. Doesn’t drag me around. Just exists. Eclipses the place and I follow because I want to and I can control it.

She nudges me toward the cauldron cakes.

“You’re allowed to buy something, you know,” she says. “You’re not above pleasure.”

“Debatable,” I say. But I pick up a liquorice wand anyway, mostly so she won’t try to psychoanalyse me for twenty minutes about “denying yourself joy” again like she did in October.

She smiles when I do. Doesn’t say anything about it. She goes back to deciding between “fizzing sugar frogs” and glacial snowflakes.

Outside, the snow’s picked up again. She breaks it after a bit. “Did you really come just because you felt sorry for me?”

I glance down, when did she start staring at me instead? I hate when she does that.

“No,” I say eventually.

Then: “I came because I didn’t want you walking to Hogsmeade alone in the snow like a bloody Victorian orphan.”

She grins, satisfied, and looks back down at the chocolate.

“I knew you liked me.”

“Didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t deny it.”

“Would you rather I did?” I retort, aimlessly picking up a pack of niffler shaped bonbons purely because I know that she didn’t notice them and would like them.