A/N: Written for the Hermione's Holiday Hideaway 2020! Many thanks to the modmins of Hermione's Haven for hosting this fest again! It's such a fun one to do! My holiday tradition was letters to Santa, my location was Gimli, Manitoba, and my pairing was Hermione Granger/Lucius Malfoy.

Many thanks to Fae Orabel for her attention to detail in beta'ing this story!

If you liked this (or hated it) let me know about it in a review! You can find me on Tumblr at crochetawayhpff or Facebook at Shan Crochetaway. Enjoy!

Summary: Lucius would do anything for his granddaughter, including tracking down her lost letter to Santa.

Pairing: Hermione Granger/Lucius Malfoy

Rating: G

Warnings: N/A

The Letter to Santa

"You did what?" Lucius asked his granddaughter Lyra. Sometimes, half of the words out of her mouth sounded like gibberish. No doubt, the influence of his daughter-in-law.

"I sent a letter to Santa," Lyra said, carefully annunciating as if Lucius was hard of hearing. He sent her a stern look. "I tracked it online and everything—"

"What's on-line?" Lucius asked, setting his cane aside to peel off his gloves. He hadn't even stepped more than three paces inside Draco's house before his granddaughter accosted him.

"Grandpa Lu," Lyra said condescendingly. "The internet, remember? I explained all about it last time you were here."

"Right, the internet. And you tracked your letter, you said?" Lucius asked. He was going to have to try and remember this for Hermione to interpret later when she arrived from work.

"Yes, I tracked it online, but it's stuck in someplace in Canada! It's been stuck for like a week!"

"Like a week? Or for a week?" Lucius asked.

Lyra rolled her eyes at him. "A week," she said. "Can you try to find it and get it for me? I want Santa to know exactly which racing broom to get for me."

"What on earth makes you think Santa is getting you a racing broom?" Draco said from the doorway of the living room. "Hi, father. Come in."

"Because I wrote to Santa, duh," Lyra said. "Anyway, Grandpa Lu," Lucius dragged his eyes back to his exuberant grandchild, "it's in Gimli, Manitoba, which is in Canada. Will you find it?"

"I'll look into it," Lucius replied seriously. Lyra's face lit up, and she gave a squeal, hugging him about the middle before running off.

"You have gone completely soft in your old age," Draco said with wonder in his voice.

Lucius winced. "Don't remind me. Did you understand any of what she said?"

He laughed. "'Course I did. I'll make sure to relay to Hermione exactly what needs to happen."

"Oh, thank goodness," Lucius replied with a heavy sigh. There was no way he was going to remember all of that.

"So where is it we're going?" Lucius asked as Hermione dragged him through the Ministry to the Portkey office.

"Gimli, Manitoba, Canada," Hermione replied. "Where Lyra's letter is stuck, remember?"

"Gimli, isn't that the dwarf in Lord of the Rings?" Lucius asked. Hermione yanked open the door to the Portkey office, and they found a small line.

"At least that's one Muggle thing you've paid attention to," Hermione said with a smirk.

"Lord of the Rings is an excellent series on the nature of good versus evil," he replied with a sniff. He quite liked the fantasy series and had been trying to find other Muggle series in a similar vein with only small success.

"Next!" the clerk shouted, and Hermione led the way over.

"Grab this," the clerk said after Hermione had given their travel vouchers, holding out a broken umbrella. Lucius wrapped his arm around Hermione's waist, and they both reached forward to hold the umbrella. A familiar tug behind his navel and Lucius found himself whisked away from the British ministry to land on hard asphalt behind a rubbish bin.

"They choose the oddest spots to place these Portkey's," he sniffed with disdain.

Hermione smiled, rolling her eyes at him. "True, but it's Canada. It's a huge country. They can't have wizard representatives in every community one might want to travel to."

Lucius conceded the point with a small nod and offered his arm to his wife. She took it, and they strode out from behind the rubbish bin to find themselves in the small car park for a hotel.

"That's convenient," Hermione said. "Let's book a room for the night and then begin our investigation, shall we?"

He acquiesced and in short order were given directions by the clerk manning the front desk of the Gimli Lakeview Resort to the local postal service. It was a short walk along the lake—a huge lake—Lucius discovered when he and Hermione took a small detour to the harbour. He couldn't even see the other side of it; it was so vast.

"Is this one of the great lakes?" he asked.

"I don't think so. I think we're too far north for that. Oh, look, a sign. 'Lake Winnipeg' it says. That's definitely a Canadian lake, not one of the great ones on the border."

A colossal Viking statue stood at the entrance of the harbour, reminding Lucius even more of the Lord of the Rings and the Argonath, the giant statues that had once guarded Gondor.

"Are you sure this isn't a town dedicated to the Lord of the Rings?" Lucius asked, indicating the Viking. Hermione tossed her head back and laughed. The bright, clear sound warmed Lucius, and he smiled in response. Anytime he could get his wife to laugh like that always served to remind him why he had married her in the first place.

"I guess I don't know for sure, but the Lord of the Rings was written in the 1940s, I suspect this town has been here longer than that. Given the Viking statue, isn't it possible it's a coincidence and that Tolkein took Gimli's name from Viking culture?"

"Too reasonable by half," Lucius murmured, drawing her close and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "Let's find this blasted postal office and get back to the hotel. It's getting quite cold."

She smiled up at him and consulted the map the innkeeper had drawn out for them, before leading them off.

A few blocks from the massive lake, they found a squat building made of cinder blocks with a sign out front proclaiming it Canada Post, Gimli. Lucius held the door open for Hermione, and they entered the building. It was quite a bit warmer inside than it had been outside and completely empty.

Hermione approached the counter and tapped the bell. "Hello?" she called out.

A small, bird-like woman with iron-grey hair popped her head around the corner and gave them a bright smile. "Be with you in a minute, dearies!" she called before disappearing again.

Hermione turned to smile up at Lucius, and he raised his eyebrow at her. She jabbed him with her elbow and rolled her eyes just as the short woman approached the counter.

"How can I help you, eh?"

"We're looking for a lost letter," Hermione said. They had agreed she should do most of the talking with the Muggles. "It's addressed to Santa Claus at the North Pole. Sent from Wiltshire UK, and we last tracked it here."

"You came all the way here for a letter to Santa?" the woman asked, sounding perturbed.

"It's my granddaughter's letter," Lucius told her imperiously. "She has tasked me with finding it and ensuring it gets to its destination."

"There is no Santa. You know that right?" the woman asked.

Lucius opened his mouth to respond, but Hermione beat him to it. She laughed. "Of course, there isn't, however, a little girl in England is tracking this letter in hopes that it will reach the North Pole. Can't you see if you have it back there and get it sent on its way?" Hermione smiled at her, and then poked her thumb over her shoulder at Lucius, "He looks mean, but he's a softie, especially for his granddaughter," she said in a stage whisper.

Lucius scowled down at both Hermione and the postal clerk but didn't say anything. Perhaps between his demeanour and Hermione's words, they could get the clerk to actually look for the letter.

She eyed them both as if they were insane for a long moment before shaking her head. "Let me take a look. Was there a return address?"

Hermione rattled off the postal address for Draco's house as the woman wrote it down. "Give me a moment," she said and bustled off to the back.

"She thinks we're insane," Lucius hissed irritably.

"I mean, she's a Muggle, love, of course she can't understand why we'd come all this way for a lost letter. Perhaps she doesn't have any grandchildren to dote on the way you dote on yours," Hermione said, with a quirk of her lips. She smoothed her hand down his arm soothingly.

Lucius nodded tightly and looked at the bulletin board tacked full of notices while they waited. He hated looking like a fool, even in front of a Muggle they'd likely never see again, but Hermione was right. He would do anything for Lyra, and if her letter could be found, he wanted to find it and get it on its way. If it couldn't be found, then he wanted to go back home and tell her he'd done everything in his power to find it. Hermione wasn't wrong in the least in telling the clerk that he would do anything for his granddaughters. He absolutely would—even going on insane little missions like this to track down letters to fictional people.

When he thought about it like that, it did sound quite insane, and he found himself chuckling.

"What is it?" Hermione asked, looking up at him with a bit of a smile about her lips.

"The fact that you humour me, like this," Lucius replied. "Narcissa would have never come with me all the way to Manitoba to track down a letter. And she definitely wouldn't have done most of the planning."

Hermione slipped her arms around his waist and hugged him close, placing her head on his chest. "Life's full of adventures if we take them when they're presented to us," she said quietly.

The clerk cleared her throat from behind the counter, and Lucius stepped back from Hermione, still holding an arm around her waist as he turned to find her holding up a bright red envelope covered in stickers. A few were dangling by threads.

"Seems some of the stickers must have gotten caught in one of the machines," the clerk said, still frowning. "You'll want to tape them up before we send it on its way."

"Thank you!" Hermione gushed. "Oh, you have no idea how much this means to Lyra! She'll think her grandfather is the next best thing since sliced bread!"

Lucius frowned at being compared to sliced bread, and he snatched the letter out of Hermione's hand, heading over to the small counter to tape up the stickers. Once he finished, he handed it back to the clerk, who was still looking at them strangely.

"Did you really come all the way to Manitoba from…" she read the return address on the envelope, "Wiltshire to track done this letter?"

Hermione threw her head back and laughed, "Of course not! We were already vacationing in Winnipeg when we got the call from Lyra saying it was lost. It wasn't too far of a drive to come up here to Gimli, so we decided to make a trip of it."

The clerk nodded and at last gave them a small smile. "Well, I'll see that we get this on its way to Santa, shall I?"

"Thank you again, for indulging us," Hermione said with a grin. Lucius nodded at the clerk and followed Hermione as she tugged him out of the postal office by the hand. By the time they had left, dark had fallen entirely in the small town.

"It gets dark early this far north," Hermione said with a shiver. Lucius looked at his watch and saw it was only four in the afternoon. "Let's go back to the hotel; maybe they'll have tea."

"Hopefully it won't be that dreadful tea we had in New York a few years ago," Lucius replied. He shuddered to think that anyone would have called that swill tea.

Hermione hummed her response and looped her arm with his. "Feels good to have found the letter so quickly. I did take three days off of work, in case this took more time."

"Three?" Lucius replied. "Well, shall we extend our stay? See the sights?"

"I think we've seen most of them," Hermione said as they walked back through the car park of the hotel. "But I definitely wouldn't mind a little mini-vacation with you before going back to the hustle and bustle of real life."

"It's a date then," Lucius replied, holding open the door to the lobby for Hermione. He made their arrangements with the clerk at the front desk, and then he and Hermione climbed the stairs to the second floor where their room was located. It was a large room with an even larger bed with warm, beige carpeting and a merry fire crackling away behind a screen across from the bed. A chaise lounge sat before the fire. Lucius was surprised to find something so cosy; he had assumed this would be just like the hotel they'd stayed at in America, drab and impersonal.

"Oh, this is lovely," Hermione said with a grin as she took off her shoes and settled onto the chaise.

Lucius stalked toward his wife, loving the way her hair spread out along the arm of the chaise and shedding his outer clothes as he went.

"You're lovely," he murmured, crawling over her on the chaise. She smirked up at him and wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

"You always say the loveliest things," she replied, lifting one leg and wrapping it around his hip. She flexed her thigh, yanking him toward and groaned when he dropped his weight on her body.

"I thought we were having tea," he murmured against her lips, nipping at her bottom one.

"I think I need something stronger than tea to warm me up," Hermione whispered, finally pressing her lips fully to his. Lucius could definitely get on board with something more substantial than tea.

~Fin~