A/N: Here it is, y'all—Chapter One! This is the Secret Santa fic for Meglette, and the prompts were Hogwarts Era, Firewhisky, and mistletoe. And there will be more. Enjoy! J

The wind whistled through the trees and lashed the snow against their thickly packed trunks in vicious eddies of white. The new snow was falling faster, too, steadily darkening the gray air. The flurries were 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 been only eleven o'clock when she had stolen quietly away from the Gryffindor common room; it couldn't be much later than noon now, but the darkening sky didn't seem interested in abiding by the amount of sunlight the clock claimed it should have.

She shouldn't even be here, thought Ginny, shouldn't be meeting him, shouldn't be doing any of this, and should have stayed in her room in the Gryffindor dormitory for a much-needed nap. Except...

Except that she couldn't have fallen asleep. She would only have kept thinking about what she'd learned that day, about what had happened to Ron, whatever that exactly even was. About why her brother hadn't told her, and neither had Harry or Hermione, and she'd had to spy and ask questions and get disturbing scraps of answers. No, she was too angry at them all to let herself sleep, and the worst part was that if she showed her anger, then they'd know that she knew what they had clearly meant her to be ignorant of.

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. And maybe they'd be better off, both of them, if they didn't meet.

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 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 Ginny had learned today.

She hadn't found the trees. She couldn't see the path behind her, either. Stupid, stupid. The words rang in her brain again and again. If she got lost and froze to death 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 snow. 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.

"Do you know where we are?" she finally asked, her eyes closed, her face snuggled against his warm chest, her head hidden by his cloak.

He shrugged. "Haven't the faintest."

She groaned. "Are we going to freeze to death out in the snow?"

"If it comes to that, no." He disengaged one arm from her, reluctantly, she thought and hoped, and pulled a small black stone from one pocket, laying it in the palm of his hand.

"What's that?" Ginny peered at the stone. The surface was smooth and dull, without lustre, but it glinted with ruby lights inside the rock.

"A Finding stone," Draco replied. "There are quite a number of abandoned buildings in the forest, and we're bound to be close to one."

"I've never heard of a Finding stone."

"Ah, no, you wouldn't have done. It isn't included in any class at Hogwarts," said Draco, rubbing the stone's surface with his forefinger. He'd taken off his glove, and his skin looked very pale.

*Why do you know about it then*, Ginny thought but did not ask. She wasn't about to ask. She didn't want to know. It wasn't the first time she'd thought something like this around Draco Malfoy. How did he know some of the magic he knew? She thought that she was better off not finding out, but not knowing, or at least not trying to find out, was so antithetical to her nature that it was a constant irritant to her.

"Here's one," said Draco. He pointed to a glowing red spark on one side of the stone. "It's very close, too." He began to walk through a clearing in the trees, holding her close to him, his cloak draped around her shoulders.

A stone building appeared in front of them, a small structure that might have been a hunter's lodge. Ginny looked at it suspiciously as he started to open the front door, which was not locked. It all seemed too convenient.

"Did you set this entire thing up?" she demanded.

Draco turned back to her, his hand on the doorknob. "Of course not," he said.

He had, of course.