This time of year, the memos that swooped around the Ministry reflected the holiday spirit – folded into the shape of flying reindeer, they zoomed from office to office, delivering messages. The metallic silver and gold reindeer indicated personal messages and notifications that were not work related. Green reindeer were the most common – just your average memo. The red reindeer meant URGENT, and that was the color parchment that had gotten tangled in Hermione's thick, bushy hair in its excitement to deliver a very important message.
Exasperated, she carefully dislodged the origami creature from her wild mane and unfolded it. Despite the recent change in attitude toward magical creatures and the laws that applied to them, the Department of Magical Law Enforcement still sent mostly lower level employees as liaison to the Department for the Regulation and Protection of Magical Creatures. Which was why Hermione knew who had written this rather dramatic four letter word scrawled in an unmistakably elegant hand: "HELP!"
Rolling her eyes, she flipped through the attached pages. When the Ministry hired Draco Malfoy a few months ago, he was given the additional responsibility of organizing a successful charity function, in hopes to prevent flack from the public for hiring a former Death Eater. According to the attached documents, it seemed that Malfoy's plan to orchestrate a holiday concert was approved, with one small recommended (read: required) alteration.
She knocked on his door not ten minutes later with her own piece of parchment in hand.
"Enter."
She did enter and was greeted by the sight of Malfoy's eyebrows rising abruptly and getting lost in his fringe.
"Granger in the flesh?" he mused in mock-awe. "And here I thought I'd be lucky to merely receive a written response."
"I had a feeling that one response wouldn't cut it, and I didn't want to spend the rest of my day writing back and forth with you," Hermione said in clipped tones.
She slapped the list on his desk and watched as he quickly read through the list she had made for him. It was nearly a foot long.
"This is far more extensive than I ever would have expected. But then again, you're Granger, so of course the list is unnecessarily exhaustive. My thanks," he said with a smirk. "But I'm still quite… mystified by this concept. I hadn't an inkling that Muggles have their own holiday songs. They're the same holidays, so I cannot fathom why our music would have reason to differ."
Hermione rolled her eyes and hoped he understood the full extent of her impatience.
"Malfoy, they don't know about magic. How could they possibly sing the same carols that witches and wizards do? 'Fairy Lights Twinkle' and 'Accio the Mistletoe' wouldn't exactly translate."
"Well, they still know all about Santa Claus." He shrugged. "I was under the impression that they suspended their disbelief of magic when it came to Christmas."
"Children believe in Santa Claus, but that's the extent of it. Adults grow out of those ideas."
"Muggles are so ignorant!" Malfoy whined. "They know about Santa Claus, and yet they don't believe that he really exists? Even after years of doing so in childhood? It hardly makes any sense!"
"I know of a few wizards who held beliefs as children that they eventually grew out of," Hermione stated, folding her arms and raising her eyebrows.
All humor drained from Malfoy's face as he regarded her through slotted, grey eyes, brow furrowed in aggravation.
"But Santa Claus is a real wizard," he said quietly. Dangerously. "What you are implying… remains to be seen."
Hermione glared at him, feeling her nostrils flare at the audacity of the implication.
She finally broke the tense silence. "Look, Malfoy, you asked for my help. So you can take the list or leave it. The Ministry wants you to include Muggle holiday songs in your concert to prove your newly found tolerance and as a lesson for the community. You can use them or not. I don't care."
With that, she stood and turned towards the door.
"Granger, wait."
She stopped moving but didn't turn to face him.
"I suppose it doesn't remain to be seen," he muttered. She imagined he spoke through a tightly clenched jaw. "I reckon all that blood nonsense is… well, nonsense. So won't you help me?"
Ready to lecture the sorry excuse for a pureblooded wizard on the necessity of doing his own work and not relying on other people to give him all the answers to every obstacle, she threw her hands up and spun around. But Malfoy was looking up at her through his fringe with a look of pleading in his eyes and his lower lip jutted out ever so slightly. Despite her reflex to gag at his blatant manipulations, all she could manage was to roll her eyes yet again and collapse back into the chair across from him, ignoring the strange softening she could feel in her abdomen.
"What else could you possibly need from me? Is this list not enough?"
His face lit up with an enormous smile of relief.
"Well I don't know the lyrics or the tunes, do I? You wouldn't let an honest, reformed young wizard just trying to make it in the world lose his job over something so silly as Christmas carols, would you?"
No, she supposed not.
.~*~.~*~.~*~.~*~.
Hermione caught the silver reindeer before it could plunge into the depths of her hair and opened it to find a message scrawled in his practiced, impeccable script: "With gratitude."
An article clipped from the Daily Prophet was folded inside the note. It was a review of the benefit concert that Malfoy had organized this past weekend, and the response was spectacular. The article raved about the quality of the music and cited the immensely positive response of the audience to the unfamiliar Muggle music that had been featured along with the traditional wizarding carols.
A paragraph towards the end of the article was circled in green ink:
"I must also extend many thanks to the lovely Hermione Granger," Mr. Malfoy added at the end of our short interview. "Her willingness to collaborate on this project and to help familiarize me with the Muggle music in the program was invaluable to the success of the concert."
And then:
The proceeds of this wildly successful holiday concert will go to the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare.
Hermione felt tears well up in her eyes as she stared at the words, stunned into immobility. Until she was startled back to the present by a new memo that had become trapped in her curls. She unfolded the red reindeer and recognized Draco's handwriting once again:
"The Ministry is no longer breathing down my neck thanks to the success of this concert. Perhaps I can begin to express to you my gratitude by treating you to dinner this coming weekend. Of course, one dinner won't be nearly enough to repay you for your kindness, but it would be a lovely start. As you can see by the color of the memo, a response is needed quite urgently."
Hermione felt her heart take flight as she leapt from her desk, reindeer in hand. Smiling up at the ceiling as she left her office, she noticed the busy crowd of reindeer zooming through the air above her. Red and gold, silver and green. She giggled at the doubly meaningful combination of colors as she practically skipped to respond to Malfoy's "urgent" memo in person once again.
FIN