A/N: Thanks to all readers and reviewers! 😊

Perhaps Ginny had been right, thought Draco.

Their conversation from two nights earlier drifted back to him now. It was not quite a fight, but not quite a simple discussion either, a subtle tension lurking beneath too many of the words they exchanged. She'd been sitting on the elegant sofa in his rooms at the Manor, cross-legged, balancing her drink on one knee, the mojito undoubtedly about to spill across the expensive leather surface at any moment. Her words were as clear now as they had been then.

"I already know you're not noble, Draco," she was saying, punctuating her words with a stab of her finger now and then. "You're not going to do anything for abstract, high-minded sorts of reasons."

"You're certainly right about that," he said, sitting next to her, his voice teasing and light, his arm round her splendid bare shoulders. He had no idea how they'd got onto this sticky topic in the first place, but he was more than ready to leave it and move on to more pleasant pursuits. "You know me so well."

"Oh, I do," she said. Something about the look in her golden eyes disturbed him, though, or perhaps it was the heavy sound of her voice.

"Do put that drink on a flat surface, Ginny," he said, plucking the glass out of her hand, still keeping his tone neutral.

"I wouldn't want to stain your lovely new sofa, Draco." She gave a strange little laugh. "How awful that would be."

"Er…" Draco always felt a bit guilty when he looked at that sofa. It was by far the newest item in his rooms; every other bit of furniture was a grand, imposing antique that had been in the family for generations. He'd bought it in a rebellious moment, wanting something for himself and Ginny to sit on that didn't carry the weight of Malfoy tradition. But it was utterly different from everything else in the manor, and he wasn't entirely sure how well cleaning charms matched to Malfoy furniture worked on new white leather.

"It doesn't really fit in here, does it?" asked Ginny, with her trick of catching his train of thought all on her own.

"Ah…" What on earth is she getting at? He wondered. "Perhaps not, but I rather like it," he settled for saying.

She put her drink down on the coffee table carefully, centering the glass on a coaster, and she looked at him directly. "Do I fit in here?"

Draco could feel himself starting to break out in a sweat, even though the room, like all the rooms in the Manor, was always rather cold. "Ginny, really…."

She played with the silver stirrer in her drink, one of a matching set that dated back to the elf silversmiths of Sheffield in the early Victorian era. "I don't, do I." Her words were not a question.

Why in sweet Salazar's name did she have to bring this sort of thing up now, when it was only two days away from Yule, when he was edgy and tense and haunted by memories of holidays past, when all he wanted from her were soothing words, soft touches, and then hours of sumptuous lovemaking in his enormous bed? A traitorous thought flitted through his mind. Why couldn't she be like the girls his father would have wanted him to marry, always saying and doing the right thing, fitting into his life like a perfectly carved jewel in a setting?

In the next heartbeat, looking into her eyes, he knew how wrong he was. Every one of those girls would have bored me to death within a month, he thought. And she's different to them because she is herself, Ginny Weasley. For better or for worse, no, she does not fit into these rooms, this house. She wouldn't be Ginny if she did. The thought made the corner of his mouth curve up in a rueful smile.

She scowled. "I don't see anything funny about that."

He leaned towards her. "Ginny, if this has anything to do with what we were discussing before, well- you already know I'm not noble. I've never claimed to be."

She shrugged. "No, you haven't. And I've always known it. Perhaps you'll never do a noble thing in all your life."

Her words stung for some reason he could not quite define. "You can't know that," he retorted. "Perhaps I will, simply to prove you wrong. Just wait and see, Ginny."

Her smile was crooked. "Perhaps. But if you ever did anything noble, then you'll undoubtedly do it in some uncharacteristically stupid way, because you'd don't know how to pull it off."

"As Potter did?" Even as he said the words, Draco wanted to take them back.

"Yes, Harry did. He does,' she said quietly in reply.

A rather strained silence fell between them then, during which Draco frantically tried to figure out where and when things had gone so drastically wrong in the bizarre, half-drunken conversation. He started at the touch of Ginny's hand on his.

"Never mind!" She waved her hand about in a way that made him wonder if she'd already had quite enough to drink that night. "I shouldn't have said anything. Forget I did. I don't want to talk about these things."

Neither did he. Instead, he took her to bed, where things were always right and good between them, no hesitation, no questions, no painful fragments intruding into the present from their pasts. Yet it was not quite enough, and later that night, looking down at her sleeping face, he'd known it. He wanted more from this relationship, even though he did not know what more might mean. He supposed that those painful hours of thought were the real reason why he'd agreed to go to the Burrow and face her insane family.

Her words had stung, so he had chosen to be noble an hour earlier and to go out to search for Ginny when he could have stayed in the dungeon. And she'd been right. He didn't know how to handle such a high-minded, selfless action, and now his idiotic noble impulse was probably going to get him killed.

The wind whipped round him, sending barrages of sleet under his scarf. He tried to look round, but he could only see the vague images of trees bending beneath the weight of the snowfall. When the wind died down for an instant, the form of a hillock became clear, and he started trudging towards that. At least it might provide some protection from the raging tempest.

Why had he decided to do this, anyway? There'd been no real need. Ginny had stayed with her mother and had undoubtedly returned to her own home already. He had set out on a mad quest to find her, and it only proved that nobility and bravery were just as stupid and useless as he'd always believed, and—

"Oof!" Draco spluttered.

The ground gave way beneath him, and he tumbled into a hole in the ground below the hillock, one that had been hidden by snow. The fall knocked the breath out of him, and he struggled to sit up. For the first time, he truly felt the piercing cold stealing through his outer clothes. The Warming charm he'd cast before leaving the dungeon had clearly worn off. Draco reached for his wand automatically, his lips already forming the word of the spell.

But his numbed fingers were grasping at nothing. The holster was empty.

"Oh, shite," whispered Draco as the awful truth dawned on him. He had last used his wand to try every spell he could think of in order to get through the door in the wall in the dungeon. Then, if he'd behaved as if he had the sense he'd been born with, he would have tucked the wand back into his belt. But he couldn't actually remember doing that. Was it possible that he'd been distracted enough to put his wand down and fail to pick it back up again?

He was very much afraid that the answer was yes.

Draco struggled to a sitting position and began to get up. A vicious gust of wind knocked him back under the crest of the hillock. Staying here was his best chance of waiting out the storm, he realized. But what if it didn't stop soon? He tucked his numbed fingers deeper into his pockets; he was really beginning to feel the cold. If I leave, I'll most likely wander about until I freeze to death, he realized. If I stay, I might easily freeze anyway.

I'm not going to get out of this.

The thought crossed his mind, and he could not get rid of it.

Draco gave a cracked laugh. That it should all end like this, in a snowstorm outside Ginny's godsforsaken family hovel! After the steadily growing nightmare of his sixth year at Hogwarts, capped by his failure to kill that old fraud Dumbledore; after that hellish year of the war when he was trapped at Malfoy Manor with Voldemort; after his world was destroyed and he rebuilt it, brick by brick; after all that suffering, all that striving, for his life to end like this. Frozen in a stupid snowbank, all alone.

If only Ginny were here. He knew how dreadful that thought was, in a very vague way, knew that he ought to have been glad that she at least wasn't going to freeze with him, but he was at the point of death, and a bit of selfishness could be forgiven, after all. Either his past sins weighed so heavily that he was headed for eternal hellfire no matter what, or something would save him. Perhaps his love for Ginny.

In that moment, when Draco truly believed that he was facing death, he did not lie to himself anymore. She would never know. No-one would. But he knew, and in these last moments, at least he would tell the truth to himself.

'I love her," he whispered. "I do." He raised his voice. "Ginny. Ginny. I love you."

Then he closed his eyes, and gave himself up for lost.

A/N: The End.

No, not really! You KNOW I wouldn't do that to all the readers out there. 😉 More coming soon.