DRACO MALFOY

The cold hits you the moment you step through the carriages and into Hogsmeade's cobblestone streets. Your breath curls white in the winter air, and the village is busy — students spilling out of Honeydukes, clusters of Gryffindors laughing too loudly near the Three Broomsticks, scarves and mittens and noise everywhere.

And then Draco is beside you.

He doesn't announce himself. He simply appears at your shoulder, close enough that the sleeve of his coat brushes your arm, and he falls into step with you like he'd been there all along. Like he belongs there. Like it was decided a long time ago and no one thought to tell you.

"You're cold," he says. Not a question.

You hadn't said anything. You hadn't even looked at him yet.

He glances down at your hands and something shifts in his expression — something quick and private, gone before anyone else could catch it.

"Come on."

---

He takes you to Gladrags first.

You hadn't planned to go in. You'd been drifting, really, with no particular destination, and Draco simply steers you through the door with one hand resting at the small of your back — light, deliberate, impossible to ignore. The warmth of the shop swallows you both.

"She'll try on the green one," he tells the witch behind the counter, nodding toward a display of winter cloaks. "The dark green. And whatever gloves you have that aren't hideous."

You look at him.

He looks back at you, and there's something almost daring in it. Go ahead, his expression says. Say something.

You don't.

The corner of his mouth twitches.

The cloak is beautiful — deep forest green with silver fastenings, thick and warm and far too expensive. You can tell just by touching it. You open your mouth and Draco speaks first, without looking up from examining the glove display.

"Don't."

You close your mouth.

"It suits you," he says simply. He picks up a pair of soft grey gloves, turns them over in his hands, sets them back down. Picks up black ones instead. "These."

He hands them to you directly. His fingers brush your wrist when he does — unhurried, like he has all the time in the world, like the contact was incidental. It wasn't. You both know it wasn't.

He pays without ceremony. He doesn't make a show of the amount, doesn't look around to see who's watching — though people are, because people always watch Draco Malfoy — he simply hands over the coins with the bored efficiency of someone who has never once in his life had to think about the cost of anything.

Outside, he holds the bag. You reach for it and he moves it to his other hand, out of your reach, without breaking stride.

You look at him.

"You'll drop it," he says.

You wouldn't have dropped it. He knows that.

---

Honeydukes is warm and smells like sugar and melting chocolate, packed with students. You're pressed close together by the crowd — closer than necessary, you think, and then you think that Draco is not a person who does anything accidentally, so perhaps it is exactly as necessary as he wants it to be.

He moves through the shop with you tucked slightly behind his shoulder, and he talks to the shopkeeper, talks about what he wants, and a box of crystallized pineapple appears on the counter, and then a second box of something dark and expensive-looking, and then — he pauses. Tilts his head. Looks at you with that careful, assessing look he gets sometimes, like he's reading something written very small.

"The salted caramels as well," he says to the shopkeeper, still looking at you.

You hadn't pointed to them. You hadn't gestured. You'd barely glanced at them.

His expression gives nothing away but his eyes are warm, the way they only ever get when it's just the two of you — except it isn't just the two of you right now, there are thirty people in this shop, and he's looking at you like that anyway, like he simply doesn't care who sees.

Your heart does something complicated.

He looks away first, passing coins across the counter. "Don't make that face," he says quietly, almost to himself.

You weren't making a face.

You were, though. And he knew exactly what it meant.

---

By the time you reach the end of the high street, you are carrying nothing. He is carrying everything — the Gladrags bag, the Honeydukes parcels, a copy of a book he pulled you into Tomes and Scrolls to buy you without a word of explanation, just this one and a look that brooked no argument.

The wind picks up. Without pausing, without looking at you, Draco reaches over and pulls the collar of your new cloak up around your jaw, tucking it closed with two careful fingers.

He does it the way someone does something they've thought about doing for a long time.

The street is busy around you. Someone from your year walks past and stares. Draco doesn't acknowledge them. His eyes are on the collar, on his own hands, and then — for just a moment — on your face. Up close like this, you can see the faint colour the cold has put in his cheeks, the pale grey of his eyes.

He drops his hands.

"Better," he says.

He turns and walks on, and after a breath — just one — you follow him.

---

At the Three Broomsticks he gets a table in the corner, away from everyone, and he orders for you both and when the Butterbeer arrives he wraps your fingers around the warm mug before you can reach for it yourself, his hand over yours for just a moment, just a second, just long enough.

He sits back. He looks at you across the small table.

All around you, the pub hums and chatters and laughs. And Draco Malfoy looks at you like you are the only still thing in a noisy world, like you are something he found and decided, quietly and without asking permission, to keep.

He doesn't say that, of course.

He says: "You're staring."

And you think, so are you.

But you don't say it.

And somehow — somehow — that makes him smile. Small and real and only for you, there in the corner of the Three Broomsticks while winter presses cold against the windows.

He takes a slow sip of his drink.

You take a slow sip of yours.

Outside, snow begins to fall.