Selcouth means strange, unusual and rare, yet marvellous; that's highly important for the title, folks.

The Monday of the first days of winter proved to be some of the coldest Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had ever experienced. In almost an instant, the snow and frost had settled on the ground like a white blanket, the crisp feeling in the air fresher than any summer breeze. Cool, sharp and biting like pins pricked in your skin, the cold of a Scottish winter was more than testament to the true beauty of the untamed wildness that it offered. Lands like these were truly magical on their own.

Already Hogwarts looked like it had been steeped in snow for weeks – all this in the course of a night or two. Everything was glacial now: white and grey, the palest of skies above their heads, the turrets stark against the unblemished sweep. No clouds, no rain, no wind. It was calm. As if waiting for something unmentioned.

Hermione Granger stepped out into the courtyard, woolly scarf looped around her neck in about three bands, her neck now warm under the gold and red stripes. Her frizzy, bushy and altogether wild hair was particularly bold this morning, starkly bright and almost shining in the pale sunlight of the early morning, golden and brown like coffee swirls and toffee, her brown eyes sparking with a beauty unseen by many. A beauty that was in awe of nature's power, and she loved it for it. She gazed up at the sky, loving how the pale blue and piercing sunlight somehow reminded her of an early summer morning too. How funny that seasons remembered each other.

"Hermione! Wait up!"

She turned around to see the obscured face of Harry Potter running towards her, coming into clarity. No matter the case or situation, his black hair was the unruly mess it always was, sticking up in such a way that he looked like he tumbled out of bed only a minute ago. Coming up to her, he smiled at her in a lopsided way that made her laugh.

"And how long have you been up, Harry?"

He scratched his head sheepishly.

"About… 10 minutes?" He grinned, making her throw back her head in laughter.

"You're a disaster, Harry," she said, cheeks blooming pink with the cold as she dipped her chin into the enclosure of her scarf.

"I know," he muttered, sidling up beside her in a casual manner.

Together, they began walking across the courtyard, the large oak tree in the corner sitting proud as it grew up into the sky, branches bare but holding firm in the bitter chill. It made Hermione smile a little to herself – she liked how easily nature showed strength in the face of such trials, time and again. One sweep of cold and humans would dash for the heat in a flurry of panicked hysteria, lest they get an illness to last them weeks into the future.

Trees, she thought. They're very solitary beings – they stand tall, proud; unable to move. And yet…

They're really rather beautiful in that solitary way.

Harry snapped her out of her thoughts with a curt comment.

"So… is something going on between you and Ron, then?"

Hermione blinked seconds before the comment registered. She whipped her head round to her best friend, hair spinning around her head like a coffee swirled halo. Her friend's bright green eyes blinked back at her through his round spectacles, the image of innocence and genuity.

Harry Potter was a loveable, unobservant dork, and his comment startled her.

"What?"

Harry seemed startled himself as he restrained the urge to throw up his hands in advance surrender.

"Well, I just – you know… you seem kind of tense around him lately,"

"I do? Wherever did you get this idea, Harry?"

He continued to blink back at her obliviously.

"You – you seem to-"

"What?" Hermione could almost feel a speck of irritancy springing up in her throat as she prepared to spew back words of vicious denial at the claim. Yet she stopped and thought. Did he have a point there? Was Harry actually being observant for a change?

Hermione quirked an eyebrow as a curiously silent answer whilst she muddled through her thoughts. Harry continued.

"Because – you know, if you're worried about it, or – concerned, or even, confused – by it-"

"Harry, I'm not confused by anything. And isn't he currently snogging Lavender Brown?"

Harry smiled nervously.

"Not curious to know about the details, actually."

Hermione grunted unceremoniously in reply. She wasn't particularly curious herself, now that she thought about it in any great detail. Ron keeping his face attached to a girl's who wasn't her really should have bothered her a bit more than it currently did – sure, he was her other best friend, one she loved dearly for all the proper, obvious reasons…

But as a… boyfriend? "Ron Weasley" and "boyfriend" somehow didn't match up in her mind quite as she thought it should have at this point. He didn't seem that way to her anymore. Not that he'd changed all that much, but rather that the age of him had dictated more than a few things to her. Like how he still seemed uncannily immature for a 16 year old boy, or that by most lengths, he still found it blood-boilingly difficult to hold back from throwing a snide comment in Malfoy's direction, no matter if he had irritated him or not.

All things considered, Ron was very like her: warm and honest and genuine; caring and just; an aesthetic of knitted jumpers, freckles and early morning coffees.

But he didn't make her heart jump. He didn't make her reassess every conversation she ever had with him.

Assuming that's how these things were supposed to feel. Hermione wasn't entirely sure. She was far more adept at her academic studies that required little emotional attachment. She liked that detachment – it was straightforward, simple and permanent once you locked it in your head. Spells, potions, magical creatures: logs upon logs of blunt knowledge in her head, and all she had to do was bring it up in a flash, and there it would be: the correct answer. As always.

Yet Hermione had always felt, in herself, that some part of her was unfulfilled in a way that books and top marks couldn't give her. The adventures with Ron and Harry; the ambient, dreary days spent in class as she reviewed rather than learned a new spell, and the changing of seasons as she laid out her days in Hogwarts – they all completed her in ways that one couldn't complete all of her. Each one had awakened and satisfied a part of her soul, and she was forever grateful for it.

And despite her best efforts to ignore the idea of first love – some fancifully stupid notion considering the state of the Wizarding world outside of Hogwarts' walls – she still found herself yearning for it. Science of her own world taught her it was natural and normal – a part of human existence to look for a way to pass on your genes.

Her heart told her she couldn't boil it down to something so drastically basic and objective.

She turned her attention to the rest of the courtyard, zoning out from Harry as he replied to whatever absent minded question she'd posed, and barely even remembering posing.

The snow was still settling even now, small, indistinct flurries cascading down in seconds every few minutes, dusting her hair in white dots that made her look almost angelic, despite her electric-shock hair.

And it was then that she spotted a small, indistinct figure on the corner of her vision too.

It took Hermione one or two seconds to figure out exactly who it was, but when she did, she was hardly surprised. Draco Malfoy had the hair of an angel, pale blonde and almost fading into the background as he stalked his way across the courtyard on her left side, a good few metres away from her. His beanie hat was pulled rather snugly over his head, but even so, the white blonde hair stood out. It was clear that he wanted to be alone – even from this far away, Hermione could tell the Slytherin was out here for privacy and some half-hearted notion of being alone with nature. She could make him out, even against the pale sky and snow steeped grounds; the bare branches of the oak tree and cool breeze that swiftly, carefully flew past her flushed cheeks with every breath.

She studied him, Harry's voice having faded into the background as she made the apt observation that Draco Malfoy and winter suited each other to a degree she had never considered before.

He reminded her of a Nordic forest – elegant, lithe and mystical; mysterious in curious ways and enrapturing no matter your view on nature.

Hermione blinked and scowled in unison.

Had she really had those thoughts? … About Draco Malfoy?!

Her scowl deepened, growing more and more uneasy with herself, by how quickly she'd romanticized the boy who had bullied her - for years.

A Nordic forest? What fantasy had she pulled that from?

Hermione silently thanked the heavens her common sense was as sharp as it always had been.

Harry's voice snapped her back to the present.

"Is that Malfoy?" The inward groan Hermione released did not surprise her – Harry had, from day one of this year, been furiously insisting that Malfoy was now one of the many cronies in Voldemort's legion of Death Eaters – a theory so ridiculous not even Ron could concoct it. Draco may have been born into an archaic family with values as old as the walls they lived in, but he wasn't his father; he wasn't that vile wretch of a man, Lucius Malfoy.

Hermione's scowl faded into an expression of indifference as she turned to her friend, a look of slight disdain on her face.

"Harry, honestly –"

"No, what's he up to?"

"What he pleases, I would assume,"

Harry's bright green eyes narrowed, dark brow furrowing his usually cheerful expression.

"That's what worries me."

Hermione's sigh spiralled into the air as a cloud of cool breath.

"Harry, when are you going to get it into your head?! Draco is not a Death Eater, and is unlikely to ever be one,"

Harry whipped his head round to look at her, scowl deepening further.

"Are you defending him?"

Hermione blinked, taking a fraction of a second to gain her composure.

"Of course not – I'm just saving you from a great deal of humiliation if you continue saying ridiculous things like that,"

Harry sniffed in response, shoving his hands into his robes' pockets as he hoisted his satchel up on his shoulder again. They stood in silence for several seconds, admiring the snowdrift as it tumbled from the sky in idle flakes.

"It's rather pretty, isn't it?" Hermione mused, a smile slipping onto her lips. Harry hummed in agreement.

She glanced at the ground momentarily before she risked another look. Tilting her head to the left, she spied him out of the corner of her eye, through the tendrils of her hair. He was knelt on the cold, hard ground, now scratching a cat under its chin with a vacant expression. His dark, pine green beanie hat had shifted back on his head, revealing more tufts of silvery hair poking out at the front, silver and forest green scarf eliciting that Nordic image of him again. His black robes had pooled around his feet as he stroked the cat's fur, the small tabby leaning in to his touch. A glimmer of a smile passed across his lips, but it was gone in an instant.

It was then that he looked round at the both of them, and Hermione felt Harry visibly tense beside her, adopting a grimace.

"Oh great, now look whose coming."

Malfoy was indeed sauntering towards them, the tabby streaking off behind the tree. Hermione bit her lip nervously as she watched him: his lip twisted up in a snarl, cold grey eyes stormy like a turbulent sky, and all manner of dangerous auras floating around him.

Potter and Malfoy.

At it again.

Coming to stand in front of them, Malfoy had pre-emptively adopted his signature sneer in such a way that it irritated Hermione almost immediately, despite the fact that it technically wasn't aimed at her.

"Potter," he drawled, glaring at him as he turned up his nose. Harry glared back in unison, green eyes fiery. Malfoy paralleled the Boy Who Lived in all ways possible: cool where Harry was fiery; pale where Harry was dark; distrusted where Harry was praised. They were really just opposite sides of the same coin – believing themselves wholly incompatible when there was probably a lot of potential for friendship. She remembered the first day clearly – how Malfoy, snotty, slick haired prat that he had been, had stepped up to Harry and offered his hand in friendship.

Harry had refused. And thus had begun the tiresome rivalry between the two.

Up close, Hermione had only really seen Malfoy once: back in second year, the first time he'd uttered the word 'Mudblood' to her, a sickeningly satisfied smirk on his lips, as if he'd won the game before it had started.

It had stung, that.

Such a filthy word and he'd used it to describe her.

She had never forgiven him for it, and doubtless ever would.

But only a blind person would fail to see that Draco Malfoy was no longer that said snot nosed, slick haired brat of a first year.

He stood before her as a slender, lithe and tall young man, chiselled features and downy hair sticking out from under his hat. His long lashes fanned on his cheeks as he blinked in a casually lazy fashion, unperturbed by Harry's rising anger. His cheeks had flushed a little in the cold, too, and at some point during her silent and inconspicuous study of him, she'd decided he was rather cute. Pretty in a boyish way.

Hermione blinked again, clasping her tome of a book to her chest a little more tightly. The hell if she needed fanciful thoughts about Draco Malfoy.

"Out for a morning stroll, Potter? Or possibly trying to search in desperate hopes of brain cells?"

Hermione let out an audible sigh – and one that made Malfoy swivel his head towards her in surprise.

"Granger," if it were possible, his sneer became more prominent, but Hermione was sure for an instant that she saw a flash of recognition in his eyes – a look that lingered on the notion of…

Well, a happiness to see her.

That truly was absurd, but that didn't stop her from being curious about it.

"If it was any of your business, Malfoy, I'd guarantee you'd be the first to know about it. With my wand in your face,"

"Oooh, touchy, Potter. Don't want to burst the remaining ones in a temper, do we?"

"I don't give a damn what you think, Malfoy!"

"Eloquence never was your strong suit, Potter. Better keep your talents to the places they work best – where I can't see them,"

Harry continued to scowl at him, black hair wild like his temper in the current moment. Malfoy cast a cursory glance back at Hermione.

"And what about you, Granger? Hunting for new friends?"

She didn't dare even rise to the bait. Or that's at least what she'd wanted to do, but she was too stubborn not to.

"If that were the case, Malfoy, you'd be doing so as well, no doubt. You might actually find people who give a damn about you,"

He flinched at the words, but his composure was regained almost immediately. He sidled up to her, menacingly glaring into her eyes. He was a head taller, and it was both parts terrifying and thrilling.

"There are people who care about me, Granger. The difference is, they're people actually worth giving a damn about in return,"

Hermione swallowed herself, as he stepped back, smirking again. And that was the last straw.

Hermione Granger hating losing, and no matter how pretty his stupid face was, she immediately thought another slap was way overdue to that acidic smile. She hurtled towards him and swung her palm up to his face, slapping it across his cheek with a force she'd forgotten she'd had. He staggered back a bit – something that made her smirk in spite of herself – and Malfoy stared at her like he had, indeed, been slapped across the face.

He'd seen it coming. The flash of fury in her eyes, the unceremonious shifting of her book to her left hand and the rapid, elegant sweep she'd made upward towards his face, brutally whacking him with her palm so hard that his cheek stung from the impact.

He clasped it in one hand, staring at her. She was positively blazing, her wild golden hair flying out around her in unholy curls, fierce brown eyes daring him to retaliate. He already could see her slipping out her wand from inside her robes, the ivy wrapped instrument delicate and deadly in equal measure.

Granger and a wand was the beast you dare not tame and dare not fight.

Malfoy opted for his iconic sneer at a safe distance, rubbing his cheek with the back of his hand.

"Nicely done, Granger." He didn't continue. Even he knew a continuation of their throat ripping comments would end in loss of limb, predictably on his side.

"Those undeserving don't receive, Malfoy. You don't fall into that category,"

Granger's last look towards him was menacing, fingers still twitching around her wand, as she grabbed Harry's forearm.

"Come on, Harry," she snapped, dragging him away with an ease that didn't surprise him, even though Potter was a head taller than the small witch as well.

As she stormed off, Malfoy watched her go: how her hair blew gently in the breeze; how her colours – warm, honey gold and soft, rich brown – made the cool backdrop burst with ferocity and heat, and that he liked the way her hips swayed as she walked.

He didn't much care that he was having thoughts like that about her.

He'd been having them for years.