Chapter 5: Shared Dream, Shared Hunger
The phantom impressions wouldn't fade. They were seared into her skin, a false memory soaked in sweat and musk. Hermione stumbled through the Ministry corridors like a ghost herself, her knuckles white around her bag strap. Every jostle in the lift, every shadow in the corner of her eye, made her breath hitch.
The reports on her desk blurred into meaningless ink. She’d read the same line about Kneazle import regulations three times, her mind replaying instead the image of her own hand tangled in the dark mass of Malfoy’s dream-clothes, pulling him deeper. Of Nott’s teeth scraping her pulse, his guilt-soured breath hot against her skin. The dreams had become a collaborative haunting.
Her smart professional clothes – a wool skirt, a crisp blouse – felt like a poor disguise. She was an open wound inside them, pulsating with something sickeningly akin to need. Every muscle in her body felt tender, sensitive, as if waiting for a touch. It enraged her. She slammed her palm flat on the desk, making her inkwell rattle. “No.”
The word was brittle in the sterile office air. No more passivity. No more drifting into their constructed nightmares. The liberation in the decision was instant and sharp, cutting through the fog.
She worked late, skipping lunch. When she finally apparated home, the silence of her flat was a reprieve. She poured a large glass of wine, but didn't drink it. It was a prop for shaking hands. Instead, she changed into soft jersey pyjamas, arms wrapped around her knees on the sofa.
Come then, she thought, staring into the darkened hallway that led to her bedroom. Let’s see what happens when you try to take me from a place I’ve willingly gone.
Sleep didn’t creep in—she dove into it, clenching her jaw, dragging the void around her by sheer will. It was reckless, insane, a soldier charging into enemy fire. It felt like freedom.
He was there already. Not waiting.Existing. The edges of the dreamscape were smeared, the bookshelves of his real-life shop twisting and melding with the walls of her flat into impossible architecture. Draco stood by the corrupted mantelpiece, a sculpture of pale, lithe tension. His grey eyes weren't hungry or cruel tonight. They were just… empty. Empty and locked on her.
"Granger." His voice echoed, not from him, but from the walls. "You shouldn't be here." He meant here, in this controlled slide into unconsciousness.
"Isn't that what you want?" Her dream-self asked, her own voice steady, betraying none of the frantic heart. "Easier prey when I'm half-drowned in terror?" She walked towards him, the ground beneath her feet feeling solid, chosen.
He flinched. A subtle movement, the tic of a muscle in his jaw. "It’s different now."
"I can feel it is." She was close enough to touch him. His energy crackled, not with predatory focus, but with jagged, frayed edges. The curse wasn't just him controlling a dream; the dream was starving it, leaching the slick charm and replacing it with raw, undressed need. The hunger was an open flame between them. It tasted bitter.It was glorious.
He surged forward and his mouth collided with hers. It wasn't a manipulation of the mind's architecture. It was desperation given form. His lips were searing, his tongue plunging between her teeth with a ragged groan that vibrated through her skull. The kiss was littered with whispered profanity, a litany of "fuck" and "please" and "Hermione," her name like a sin he couldn't hold back any longer.
Her rational mind screamed, a distant, useless siren. The thing he'd cultivated inside her, the gnawing echo of countless phantom climaxes, roared to life in answer. She clawed at the back of his shirt, tearing at nothing, and suddenly their dream-clothes evaporated. Not a sensuous fade. A violent, shocking shearing of fabric, leaving them naked, skin to humid skin.
He wasn't careful, dream-Malfoy from before, an artist of sensation. This was the incubus, the beast his ancestors had cursed him to become. He gripped her ass, lifting her easily, and she wound her legs around his waist. He carried her back, not to a soft bed, but slamming her spine into the rough wood of a twisted dream-shelf. The impact shuddered through her. He didn't ask. He just adjusted his hips and pushed.
"Oh, god." It ripped from her, a choked cry of pure shock.
He was huge, hot, an impossible stretch that bordered on pain as he filled her in one brutal thrust. It wasn't the slick, perfect giving of a constructed body. It was this one.Hers. And it was full of him, achingly full, to the point of oblivion. She sobbed, the sound swallowed by his mouth. He began to move. No rhythm. Just savage, driven thrusts, pistoning his cock so deep inside her she felt him in her stomach.
"Yes." The word was dark velvet from his mouth. "Take it. Take every last fucking inch of what I am. Feel how I ruin you."
The obscenity was hot against her ear. It wasn't erotic. It was warfare. And she was surrendering. No, engaging. She dug her fingernails into the impossibly hard planes of his shoulders, dragging bloody furrows that wept black in the dream-light.
"Harder," she snarled, bucking against him, the ridge of the shelf biting into her back. It was the most honest thing she'd ever said. The invitation broke the last restraint in him.
His pace became frantic, punishing. The wet, filthy sound of him driving into her drowned out everything. His breath hitched, his own composure shattered as he fucked her with a frantic, animal rhythm. She could feel the tension coiling in his balls, slapping against her flesh with every surge forward.
"I'm going to fill you up," he gasped, the growl tearing from his throat. "You're going to wake up with my come in you, soaking your cunt, you mad, perfect fucking witch." The promise was poison and it sent a shockwave through her.
That did it. That exact, raw, vile truth. Her climax wasn't a rising wave but an internal detonation. It seized her, violent, consuming, tearing a scream from her throat that was half agony, half ecstatic release. Her inner muscles clamped down on his cock, milking him, and it pushed him over the edge.
He shouted, a raw sound of agony and relief as he drove into her one last, vicious time and came. She felt it, the hot, frantic pulse deep inside her, the shocking reality of his pleasure flooding her dream-body. His head dropped against her shoulder, his breath heaving, his entire form shuddering against her.
For long moments, the only sound was their ragged breaths and the drip of condensation from some impossible ceiling. She was impaled on him, against the bookshelf, utterly wrecked.
Slowly, he eased out of her. She gasped at the sense of loss, the dull, tender throb left behind. Her legs, when he let them slide to the floor, wouldn't hold her. He caught her, his hands suddenly gentle on her shaking arms, lowering her to a patch of floor that seemed to sprout woven rugs.
She looked up at him. The hunger in his eyes was gone. Only grey exhaustion remained, tinged with something like horror. "Hermione..." he whispered.
The backdrop of the dream began to dissolve first at the edges. Darkness bled in. But as consciousness pulled her back, a heavy, leaden reality she dreaded returning to, she understood the transaction. The feed had been direct, ferocious. The incursion was no longer stealthy. It had been an assault. And she had fought back on her terms, matching him transgression for transgression.
She didn't want to wake up. For once, the dream, with all its savagery, felt more real than the world that waited.
But wake she did, just as dawn smeared grey light against her window.
She sat up, sheets cool and smooth around her, and touched her thighs beneath her soft pyjamas.Dry. Clean.
The cry that tore from her chest was silent, a choke of ultimate confusion. How much of it had been real? Could this mind-game actually put his essence inside her? The phantom fullness remained, a ghost of the throbbing pressure. But her skin bore no marks. Her sheets held no proof. Only the scorched memory remained, so vivid she could still smell him, still taste the copper of his name in her mouth. Had she starved him or fed him? The line between predator and collaborator had dissolved in that chaotic union, and she had no map for this new, hollowed-out landscape.
The flat was terribly quiet. The glass of wine on the living room table, untouched, caught the first pale ray of the sun, glinting like a cold, mocking eye.