Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, Hogwarts, or any of the characters in this fic. I also do not own Christmas, or snow. That last is a horrible disappointment, let me tell you.

Author's Notes: This was writen for m'Manda's birthday. Yay, Birthday! The prompt/requested theme was "snowball fight" -- and yes, I am aware that I twisted it a bit. But just a bit.

Go read now, and please don't forget to review!

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Sirius Black liked snow. He really, really liked it. He liked it so much that he was out in the middle of it, rolling around in all the biggest drifts, when any sane person would have been inside the castle revising that big Transfiguration essay that was due tomorrow morning.

Lily cursed, and glared at the laughing, frolicking black-haired teenager. It was bad enough she had no gloves, but how was she supposed to enjoy her evening walk in the snowy wonderland when Black was outside, too?

Without thinking, she bent down and collected several handfuls of snow, packing them together tightly. Once she had them formed into a nice, tidy, eminently aerodynamic shape, she lobbed it at Black's head, as hard as she could.

She missed.

"Drat," she muttered, and reached down to do it all over again.

There was a very belated "Hey!" from Black's direction, and a moment later, he was desecrating with his shockingly cheerful presence the snow bank nearest her. His gray eyes, usually so unreadable to her, were curious.

"What was that for?" he demanded, his head cocked doggishly to one side.-- Lily thought about her use of that word. Doggishly. While it was true he looked nothing like a dog, and dogs were generally much better-behaved creatures, she wouldn't have been half surprised to learn he had fleas.

Mental ones, at the very least.

Since she had no answer to his question that didn't make her seem petty, childish and annoyed -- of which she was only the latter -- Lily just lifted her eyebrows blandly. She made another snowball and tossed it casually over her shoulder, as if to illustrate that no, she had not in fact been aiming at him.

He looked unconvinced, and she glared at him for not being an idiot. That was the problem with Black; no matter how much he seemed like he should have been, he wasn't an idiot. And neither, much to her undying aggravation, was Potter.

Speaking of whom...

"Where's your other half?" Lily asked Black abruptly, and perhaps a touch too caustically.

Black shrugged and, to her surprise, grinned. "James has detention."

Lily barely managed to keep the disapproving frown off of her face. "It's bad form for the Head Boy to get detention," she muttered, idly scooping more snow into her bare hands.

"The one he's serving should have been mine," said Black, calmly, as if friends getting detentions for each other happened every day. And, really, she supposed they did -- just not to her, because all of her friends would rather have died than get detention. She sort of wondered what she was missing.

There was a moment of silence, and then she heard him ask, "Why don't you have any gloves, or something?"

"My roommate burned mine," she answered curtly, really not wanting to reply at all, but feeling it was only fair that she do so, considering he already had.

"What?"

"It was an accident, and now it's a long story, so just leave it at she burned them and now I don't have any, all right?" She pushed her palms together and crumbled the snowball she'd been making. Glancing up, she threw him an accidentally sincere half-smile. "I don't like gloves, anyway."

"No?" he queried, glancing down at his own thick pair. They were black, of course. And they made his hands look even bigger than his usually did; their only redeeming quality, as far as Lily was concerned, was that they also made his hands look clunkier. Pudgy hands on Black were a vast improvement to pale, slender, elegant hands with deliciously long fingers.

Not, of course, that she wouldn't have rathered see him in mittens, where she wouldn't have been able to discern anything at all about his fingers. Really, mittens were infinitely preferable to mere gloves, she decided.

Black was watching her again.

"Mittens are much better," she averred, nodding, and congratulating herself on sounding excessively superior. Black would probably expect it of her, under the circumstances, and one must keep up appearances. Especially when dealing with Black; he reported to Potter, after all.

Black was forming his own snowball now, and not looking at her anymore. "Don't you have mittens, then?"

"No," she admitted, regretfully. "Why?"

Trying to look casual, he gave an exceptionally exaggerated shrug, saying, "Your hands are going to get cold."

"They're already cold," she returned, holding them up to show him how cold they looked. Hm. Was the skin under her fingernails a bit blue already, or was that her imagination?

"They'll get frostbitten," Black mumbled, attempting a concerned expression.

Well. Lily could see right through that in a big hurry.

"I'm not going inside, Black," she informed him haughtily.

For a moment he looked surprised, and a little guilty. "I wasn't saying you should!"

"Give it up," she said, batting snow at him. It splashed across his chest, catching on his cloak and the Gryffindor scarf he was sporting today. "You can't really be concerned about the state of my hands, so you must want me to go inside."

He didn't answer right away, and she assumed the conversation had been dropped. Then he asked, "What kind of mittens do you like?"

"Fur," she answered automatically, startled into giving another truthful response. Well, since she'd already committed herself to it, she might as well... "White fur mittens.

"White?" repeated Black, skeptically. "Why white?"

"They don't remind me of you," she retorted smugly, glad to have a glib answer perfectly read to throw at him, finally.

Growling, he flung his snowball at her. She ducked and it sailed right over her head. He growled again, muttering "Damn," under his breath.

Lily smirked, hefted her own snow-filled hand to test the weight, and then threw. The snowball hit him smack in the middle of his startled face. As Lily cackled, Black sputtered, blinked, and wiped snow and water from his eyes.

"I hate how everyone beats me," he muttered, but for once, Lily could detect no heat in his voice when he said the word hate. She sent him a cheeky smile, and dove for another snowball, Black several feet away, but not far behind.

After that point, their snowballs flew with remarkable speed, though rather lackluster accuracy, especially in Black's case, for what was most definitely at least a quarter of an hour. Then, when Black had endured his eighth positively snow-filled face in what couldn't have been more than five minutes after which he promptly declared himself both soundly beaten and sorely squirmy thanks to all the snow and cold water trickling down the front of his cloak and robes and jumper, Lily squealed triumphantly and executed a little twirl of delight.

She promptly toppled into the nearest snow bank, which just so happened to the largest they'd found so far, but she was much too pleased with herself to care, and didn't even go to the bother of pretending the collapse had been intentional.

"I don't think I've ever won a snowball fight before now," she admitted rather breathlessly, staring happily up at the white sky, which for some reason was spinning dizzily. The cold snow against her back was meltingly slowly, seeping into her cloak and turning it regrettably damp; in a little while she would have to get up, but for just a few minutes longer she was perfectly content to lie on the ground and enjoy things the way they were.

She heard Black grunt, and felt a much larger body drop into the snow bank not that far away from her resting spot. Still, all she could see was white, white, white wherever she looked and it was absolutely lovely.

"I never win snowball fights," came his voice, obviously disgruntled, and much as it went against both their characters she would almost have thought that he'd let her win, except for the resignation in his words. "Never, never, never."

She lifted her head just a little and tried to peer over at him. "Never?" she asked, with a saucy, irreverent little smile.

He could barely see her, but he must have recognized her facial expression in the odd lilt of her voice, because he laughed, the same way he'd been laughing when she'd first ambushed him. It was a loud, unrestrained sound, one which she had no trouble imagining him letting loose with even when no-one was around, if for nothing else than to have something with which to fill the silence. Black disliked silences almost as much as he liked snow.

"Never," he assured her warmly, lifting his own head and propping it up with one absurdly large, gloved hand. His eyes were sparkling, and he looked quite different than she was used to seeing him -- and yet, he also looked exactly the same.

She wondered if perhaps this carefree, handsome young man was the one that everyone else in the school was in love with, rather than the cruel, wicked, sneaky boy that he'd always seemed... until now.

The oddity and fleetingness of the situation gripped her, and she couldn't help herself from taunting, "Even Pettigrew beats you?"

He slid his hand out from under his head, and infuriatingly unmussed black hair fanned around him as he flopped his head back to the snow. He looked slightly annoyed, but he was laughing again.

"Especially Peter," he sighed, though really it was more like another laugh. Lily found herself fascinated. "I can't fathom it, but Peter beats me even worse than James does -- which is ridiculous, you know, because James has so much better aim. And he throws harder, too."

For some reason, Lily had a sudden mental image of Potter flinging a ball of ice at Black's face, in much the same manner as he flung the Quaffle straight into whichever hoop he was aiming at during every single Quidditch match she'd ever been to in the past six years. She winced, and let her body sag back into the snow, as well.

"I don't think I should very much like playing in the snow with Potter," she said ruefully, almost absently. Her mind was still on how much getting hit by one of Potter's iceballs -- she was sure, for some reason, that he used iceballs, at least when battling Black -- would undoubtedly hurt.

She wondered whether it was thanks solely to the genius of Madame Pomfrey that Black still had anything that could be remotely considered a nose still so perfectly in the center of his face. Her head came up from the snow of its own accord, and she stared shamelessly at Black.

All right, so that gorgeous, stupidly aquiline nose wasn't precisely in the center of his face, but she was convinced it qualified as perfect. On some scale that had nothing to do with her personal preferences, of course. Which was the same sort of measurement that absolutely didn't find his eyebrows woefully dashing, especially when cocked just like that, in the peculiar manner Black had when he was looking curiously at something which was behaving in an odd fashion, such as the Head Girl practically drooling over his exquisitely arranged features and--

... Oh, God.

This time it was Lily's flaming face that fell into the snow, and through it she muttered a particularly unflattering, and only slightly muffled, very crude description of his sadly inadequate parentage.

To her great surprise, and reluctant amusement, he roared with laughter, and then announced, "Why yes, actually, I am."