A/N: This is the one-shot version of Of Snowfalls, Firewhisky, and Mistletoe, the Secret Santa fic for megglette in the DG Forum exchange. The three words in the prompt were firewhisky, mistletoe, and Hogwarts-era (this is set during Draco's sixth year, Ginny's fifth.) There is that other version, but it’s turning out to be very different from this, a lot longer, and with a much higher rating… so that will eventually be published here. There’s just too much that I’m not going to post on FFN!!

Anyway, here’s the short, sweet, and fluffy one!  There are some similarities to the longer fic, but a LOT more differences… so it’s not really a shorter version of the same thing. Enjoy!

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The wind whistled through the trees and lashed the rain against their thickly packed trunks in streams of gray. The rain was falling faster, steadily darkening the sky. When she’d set out half an hour before, there had been only a light drizzle, but now it was threatening to turn into a storm. Blundering her way along what was laughably called a path, Ginny Weasley thought, and not for the first time, that the Forbidden Forest had been given that name for a good reason.

Maybe she ought to have paid more attention to it. But it was too late now.

“Lumos,” she whispered again, her wand drawn, and again, the tip of her wand flickered feebly. An Explosion hex probably wouldn’t have made much difference to the growing darkness. It had already been late afternoon when she had stolen quietly away from the Gryffindor common room, and the sun was still setting early; spring had barely begun.

Ginny paused. They were supposed to meet at the cluster of beeches that was known as the Three Sisters, where they had already met several times before. This landmark had always been easy to find in the past. Not now, she thought grimly, trying and failing to pull the hood of her cloak over her head.

And maybe they’d be better off, both of them, if they didn’t meet. Yes, they probably would.

Or, wait… did she see three trees just off the path?

Ignoring the tiny voice of reason that told her it would be a much better idea to retrace her steps back to the Hogwarts castle, Ginny set out for the cluster of trees. If she’d listened to reason, after all, she never would have started meeting him in the first place. And she certainly wouldn’t have replied to the note he’d somehow managed to slip under her plate at breakfast that day, asking her to meet him in the forest. Where they’d have more privacy; where they could talk. Ginny supposed she’d known perfectly well that it would take all of her strength and resolve to keep from slipping into a state where talking was highly unlikely to be all they’d do. They had met in abandoned classrooms, in broom closets, on deserted staircases… but always in places where their hearts thumped with urgency, where her breath was caught with nervousness, because they both knew that they might be spotted at any moment. And that was the one thing that must not, could not, be allowed to happen.

Especially not after what had happened today.

She hadn’t found the trees. She could barely see the path behind her through the torrents of rain blurring her vision. Stupid, stupid. The words rang in her brain again and again. If she got lost and caught pneumonia from the rain in the Forbidden Forest because she’d been moronic enough to meet him there, then she deserved what she got, she thought savagely. Ginny shoved her hands out blindly and encountered a tree trunk.

Something made her stop then, although she wasn’t quite sure why. It wasn’t the smooth bark of a slim, upright beech. When she peered closer, she could see that she’d found a gnarled, twisted oak, ancient beyond imagining. A shiver went over her that had little to do with the cold and the wind and the wet. Any tree like this would have been marked out as a conduit for powerful magic; it would have been visited by History of Magic classes during the section about druids and elves in the British Isles. This tree might have been a sapling when the Old People joined hands and danced around its trunk in a fairy ring. It might have guarded the altar of sacrifice where Druids offered up traitors to the revengeful face of the Dark Moon Goddess. It might have—

*Oh, stop it, you idiot!*

Her hand kept blundering; she wasn’t sure what she was trying to find. But then she did find something. Her icy fingers encountered a gloved hand. She heard a low, startled sound.

“Ginny, you idiot,” said a low, drawling voice, and the hand yanked her closer, and she was pulled into the arms of Draco Malfoy.

She was so relieved to see him. Too much relief, too much happiness, a flare of joy, and her anger at herself for feeling all these forbidden things put an edge to her voice.

“I suppose I am an idiot,” she said. “Or I would’ve known what a bad idea it was to agree to meet you here!”

“Maybe,” he said, pulling her closer still, until she could feel his heartbeat under his warm fur-lined cloak, and his strong arms went all the way around her, and she couldn’t be angry anymore.

Ginny had been determined to hold herself apart from him, to keep Draco at arms’ length and then some. Until she had a chance to explain herself, of course, and then his face would turn cold and close against her, and whatever emotions she had towards him would become irrelevant. Except that she didn’t have emotions towards Draco Malfoy, as she had to keep reminding herself again and again. Whatever she thought she’d once felt for him, that feeling was dead; it had to be, she herself had severed it by her actions that day.

At last, she did pull herself away from him, and she began to give her rehearsed speech, wishing desperately that she’d been able to take a few gulps of Firewhisky beforehand.

“Draco, I met you today because I’ve got to tell you something,” she said. “It’s only fair to tell you before you hear it from someone else. A lot of people saw what happened, and even though they were all Gryffindors, you’re going to find out about it sooner or later. So I thought I’d meet and tell you about—about what happened,” she went on lamely.

He was silent, which was not what she had expected. But then again, she never knew what to expect from him.

“Did you,” he said in neutral tones. “Well, as it happens, Weasley, you can save yourself the trouble.”

“Uh…” She was taken aback. Had the Hogwarts gossip mill really ground that fast? Apparently so. “Um, does that mean that you know about what… happened this afternoon?”

“I was told the entire charming story of the triumphant Weasley-Potter merger in the Gryffindor common room after the Quidditch match,” said Draco. “Pansy Parkinson was most helpful in this regard.”

Ginny groaned inwardly. This was exactly what she’d feared most, that Draco would find out what had happened before she herself had the chance to tell him. But then again, how would it have helped for her to be the bearer of bad news? Maybe it was better this way.

“I’m sorry you found out like that,” she fumbled. “I really am. I wanted to tell you myself—“ Her throat suddenly closed, and she found, to her horror, that she was crying. It was the last thing that she wanted to do, and her greatest secret fear had been that she would break down during her little speech about how their time together was over now, and they’d both known from the start that this bizarre thing between them had to come to an end sooner rather than later, and that she’d always wish him well, and that she hoped he felt the same for her, and… and…

She buried her face in her hands.

His strong fingers pulled her hands gently away from her face and tipped it up to his. She closed her eyes in sheer cowardice. She didn’t want to see that he was angry, or hurt, or most likely of all, that he was simply wearing the cold mask that she knew so well. That was exactly why she hadn’t looked at him even once while she was talking. She simply didn’t want to know.

But Draco’s face was strangely soft and unguarded, the face that she’d seen glimpses of all along and that nobody else had perhaps ever seen. He didn’t even look angry at her, which was the worst of all. A wave of shame rushed over Ginny. It didn’t help that she knew how awful she must look, her face probably red as a Fire hex and her nose swollen with tears.

He blotted her eyes with a linen handkerchief; she saw the M initial embroidered on one corner. “You never do have a tissue during emotional moments, do you?” he asked, and his voice was almost amused. “Good thing I’ve got this.”

Her shame was complete. Ginny tried to hang her head, to do anything so that she wouldn’t have to look at his face, but the tip of his finger remained under her chin, gently, inexorably.

“As a matter of fact, Ginny,” he said, “I sent you that note because I meant for us to have a conversation along those same lines. One that would have amounted to more or less the same result, anyway.”

“You… you did?” faltered Ginny. It was not lost on her that he had still addressed her by her first name. “You mean that you think we shouldn’t be… together… anymore?” ‘Together’ was undoubtedly not the right word, because there was no word that made any sense at all for whatever it was they’d shared over the last several weeks.

“It’s not… wise.” Draco’s face did close against her then for a brief moment, which filled her with a perverse desire to see what emotion lay behind that blank surface.

“Why not?” asked Ginny.

Draco seemed to come back to himself then, as if shaking himself awake from some unpleasant vision of the future that only he could see. “Never mind. Ginny, this is one of my rare noble impulses, and it coincides with the fact that you’ve finally nabbed Potter anyway. Let’s leave it at that.”

Slowly, she nodded, feeling strangely empty. He was agreeing to what she’d wanted. He wasn’t even angry at her over what he’d heard about her kissing Harry in front of the entire Gryffindor student body after the Quidditch match. She should leave it at this. She should walk away right this second, before the rain grew any worse, before darkness fell completely.

She should. At any second now, she was going to.

But the seconds ticked by, and still Ginny stood only a heartbeat away from Draco Malfoy, so close that she could still feel the warmth of his body.

Then she jumped when she felt his hand on hers. “What?”

“Look.” Draco pointed overhead, and she craned her neck to see.

They were standing beneath a twisting vine of mistletoe growing in the branches of the ancient oak. The red berries drooped from the oval leaves of that most pagan plant in a scarlet and green mass. Ginny straightened her neck, and she saw that Draco’s head was bending down towards hers.

“One last kiss for luck?” he murmured, and she nodded, and then their lips touched. The kiss seemed to go on forever. The cold and the rain were shut out, and there was nothing but the warmth of his mouth on hers.

Finally, they pulled apart; she was never sure who did so first. Her lips tingled painfully, as if they had become molded to his, as if her body didn’t understand why they had to separate now even as her mind knew that they did.

“Goodbye, Draco,” her mind managed to force her lips to say, even as they tried to shout come back, come back, never leave me again!

He left her first, and she waited to follow him in case anyone had seen them leave at the same time. She watched his slender tall body from behind, a glimpse of shining blond hair escaping from under the hood of his cloak, watched until he disappeared in a bend in the path and she had no excuse to stand in the rain. Then she turned back towards Hogwarts, walking slowly, wearily, feeling as if she were five hundred years old instead of fifteen, knowing already that no matter what might happen with Harry Potter in the future, she would never forget that kiss with Draco Malfoy under the mistletoe.

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The woman stared unblinkingly into the Pensieve, even as the last image of the young girl walking in the rain faded and vanished from the surface of mist swirling in the stone basin. Then she blinked and sat up, looking around her as if she had lost track of her surroundings, of the time, of the place, of everything. She pushed back a strand of straight red hair that had fallen over her pale face and stared at herself in the mirror on the wall across from her. She looked young, but there was an indescribably hard set to her pretty face, something in the jaw or the cheekbones, as if she’d put herself together after a disaster and then vowed to never be broken by anyone else, ever again. It was a look that many people had in the days after the war.

A figure came up behind her, reflected in the mirror, a slender graceful woman draped in a dark veil. She reached up to take off the veil, and her face was revealed. The strange thing was that Ginny could not have said anything definite about her appearance, except that she was not young, but still beautiful.

“Did you find what you wished to see?” asked the witch who ran the Pensieve service.

Ginny Weasley nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I think I understand more now.”

The woman nodded and waited for her to speak further. Ginny had the strangest feeling that she should, even though there was no obligation for her to do so, as far as she knew. These Pensieve services had sprung up after the war, and they were popular among many people who wanted to remember something precious about a lost past. Ginny had never heard that the process involved anything other than the client describing the kind of memory they were searching for and then being guided to a Pensieve for a private vision. But maybe she was supposed to talk to this mysterious witch, after all.

“I think I found the memory I was looking for,” said Ginny.

“The turning point,” said the witch.

“That’s what it was, all right,” said Ginny.

“And have your questions been answered.”

“I don’t know.” Ginny turned to the witch suddenly, her normally impassive expression oddly pleading. “Was there anything else I could’ve done? I just don’t see how it could have gone any differently, how I could’ve chosen anything else. I mean… do you think there was any other way?”

It was a strange question considering that she hadn’t really explained anything at all to the witch before sitting down in front of her chosen Pensieve. But the other woman sighed as if she knew without being told exactly what Ginny meant.

“You did what was given to you to do, Ginny Weasley,” she said. “That’s all that any of us can ever do.”

Ginny blinked. “How did you know my first name?”

The witch smiled then, a small, secretive smile. “It’s given to me to know many things,” she said. “Go now.” Her hand was on Ginny’s arm in a surprisingly strong grip, easing her up from the chair.

“But—but how much do I owe you? I haven’t paid yet,” said Ginny as she was ushered out the front door into the street.

“Oh, you’ve paid in full,” was the witch’s enigmatic answer, and then the door closed behind Ginny and she found herself in the small alley at the edge of what had once been Hogsmeade, staring stupidly at the falling snow.

“Argh,” she said to nobody in particular. “That was not my idea of an answer.”

Behind her, the door swung open again.

“But you haven’t given me the bill,” protested a deep male voice that suddenly sounded familiar. “I fully expected to pay for this service, but if you won’t even tell me how much I owe—“

Ginny jerked herself around, back towards the door of the shop, hardly able to believe her ears.

“You have already paid in full, Draco Malfoy,” said a wizard standing on the other side of the threshold. He was tall and slender and somehow looked familiar too, but his face was oddly blurred and Ginny couldn’t have said what he looked like.

The younger wizard standing in the street, on the other hand…

“It’s you,” Ginny said stupidly, looking at Draco Malfoy standing in the rain across from her. He stared back, his fair hair plastered to his head as he stood without pulling up the hood of his cloak, standing as immobile as if he’d never move again.

Except that he did, he must have, because he was suddenly standing right beside her and she was in his arms, he was holding her up because her legs didn’t quite seem to work, and she smelled the faint tantalizing smell of dark chocolate that he always seemed to be hiding somewhere that she had never quite been able to find, not that she hadn’t tried.

“I want to try again,” said Ginny, staring up at him, at the pale beloved face that she had never forgotten.

And his face lit up with a smile that transformed all of him, the rainy day, the gray wet street, everything. Before she could explain that she was talking about trying again to find the chocolate, of course, because she couldn’t possibly mean anything else, he was taking her chin in his hands and pointing up towards the top of the lamppost they stood under.

A spring of green and red mistletoe glistened in the cold rain of late December. Her eyes filled with tears.

“You remembered,” she whispered.

“Of course I did, Ginny,” he said, and then his lips were on hers, and nothing in the world existed except the two of them, and the future that lay before them now that they had the courage to grasp it.

From inside the shop, the witch stared out the window at the entwined pair. When she saw the reflection of the wizard in the plate glass, she only smiled, as if she’d been waiting for him a few minutes.

“Where have you been, Draco?” asked Ginny’s older self.

The wizard behind her laid his hands on her shoulders and turned her round to face him. “Waiting until you found a way to bring us back together, Ginny,” he whispered. “I see you finally managed it.”

“Yes. And as long as the Ministry of Magic doesn’t find out I’ve been using those hybrid Pensieve-Time Turners for years, I think I’ll keep managing it,” she said.

“You always were a clever girl,” whispered the older Draco. “I knew you’d find the correct reality eventually. Although you can be a bit thick sometimes. Honestly, why did you think that the reality where we were living five hundred years in the future on a moon of Saturn had any chance of working? Or the sixteenth-century Ottoman harem setting? Not that I didn’t enjoy being Sultan Suleiman with his collection of several hundred slave girls, but still—“

She reached up to smack him. He caught her hand and turned it over to kiss the palm. “They all looked like you, Ginny,” he said tenderly. “Every one of them. But none of that matters now. I’ve found you, and I’m never letting you go again.”

He tipped her chin up and pointed at the sprig of mistletoe hung over their heads, above the window. And as his mouth came down on hers, Ginny knew that no matter how many lifetimes she had spent searching for Draco, finding him again and kissing him under the mistletoe made it all worthwhile.

THE END.