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Hermione wakes, overwarm and suddenly alert, to find her bedroom dark and silent. A glance at the charmed clock says it's half three. This is another excellent reason she rarely has a fourth pint: sleep disturbance is an even more reliable side effect than awkward, regrettable honesty.
With a small sigh she shuffles into slippers and out to put the kettle on.
In the kitchen Hermione flicks a single candle lamp to life, a wizarding affectation in her mostly modern muggle flat. She sets to making tea and contemplating the mostly-speculative history of polyphasic sleep patterns. It certainly isn't her preference, but a corpus of autobiographical writings suggests that prior to the industrial revolution people often slept in two regular periods separated by a short, peacefully wakeful interlude. French historians cite use of the word dorveille to refer to this nocturnal interval of consciousness in a context indicating its normality, though in modern use the word connotes a state somewhere between waking and dreaming. British historical sources, less poetic as usual, speak of first and second sleeps.
Muggle historians suggest that the practice of so-called split sleep only ended with the widespread adoption of the lightbulb. But wizards have never been at a loss for ways to light the evening. Whether that power goes back far enough to influence something like circadian rhythms is anyone's guess.
Warm chamomile tisane in hand, Hermione wonders if there's any sort of wizarding sociology research that would have considered the difference or if sleep habits were simply considered a personal idiosyncrasy. Probably still are.
As she blows patterns in the steam above her mug and muses on the state of wizarding social science, Hermione's mind shifts to a vivid daydream. A ministry office, empty and impersonal, the space unimportant, especially compared to the desk at the center and the extremely naked woman bent facedown over it.
She stares, ravenous and awestruck, at the lush feminine form spread out before her, warm golden curves and a wild cascade of dark curls swept forward obscuring her face. Small hands press flat and wide against the desk as the woman writhes sensuously, arching up to meet the press of her cock—that can't be right. Hermione doesn't have a cock. Doesn't know what it feels like for a woman to thrust herself firmly onto it and grind her hips down, dragging exquisite friction hot along its length. Except at this particular moment she is vividly aware of exactly those sensations.
She can't think over the breathy noises and stunning view, the pure immersive bliss of the moment. This is wrong. Her skin is on fire with pleasure. Not hers. It feels so good she can hardly form words, like a fucking dream. A dream. This is a dream. She can wake up.
That single lucid thought brings perspective rushing back. Hermione is in her own living room holding her own tea, thankfully unspilt despite her shaking hands. She looks down at the crotch of her pyjamas and sees nothing unexpected. The dreamscape recedes, still present in her mind but no longer eclipsing her awareness.
This has happened before. Like the book of curses. Like the empty table and the note. This is Malfoy's vision, not her own.
Hermione barks a laugh, splashing at the surface of her tea instead of sipping it. It is four a.m. and Malfoy is having a sex dream —hell, maybe just a late wank— to which she has, for reasons unknown, been invited.
She ought to simply push the image from her mind as quickly as possible but, somewhat predictably, curiosity gets the better of her. It's Draco Malfoy's sex dream. Who wouldn't become a little nosey when presented with such an outrageous opportunity? Witch Weekly has run exclusives based on far less. Not, of course, that Hermione would ever violate Malfoy's privacy by divulging what she sees in the ostensible solitude of his mind in the small hours of the morning, but she is nonetheless aware of the cultural context that makes this a positively irresistible tidbit of forbidden knowledge.
Satisfied that her motives are harmless, just a small amount of pettiness and basic human curiosity, she reaches for the foreign space in her mind, pulling it forward. The scene comes into focus and her body tenses, lust twisting sharply in her core even before she can fully parse what she is seeing.
The image now centers on a divinely rounded arse pulling and flexing against her thrusts. Hip bones canting into the grip of her broad hands. Erotic charge flickers up her spine, lights up her entire body. Soft ardent moans. A scent, sex and something enticingly feminine. She feels the supple give of warm olive skin as her long, pale fingers grasp and pull the woman's backside closer, driving her deeper. She speeds up. Her hips slap into the exquisite arse in front of her hard enough to feel their joined bodies crash against the desk with every thrust; the cheap furniture creaks in time with the woman's gaspy little moans.
As the vision traces up generous curves to delicately freckled shoulders, a cold and sickly sense of recognition creeps into Hermione's awareness. The image continues but she hardly follows as she realizes —she knows— whose face would look back at her if she swept aside her partner's now-familiar mess of curls. Reflex shoves the image away hard.
The transgressing vision dissipates completely this time. Hermione's thoughts are abruptly and entirely her own again.
She reels.
That was her. In Malfoy's dream. Naked. With Malfoy. Fucking him.
Laughter is the only response Hermione can summon and once it starts she can't stop. She sets the tea aside and gives in to the feeling, snorting and hugging her sides, sobbing out laughs and vaguely noting the hysterical edge to them.
Even once she regains her breath it takes a whole dumbstruck minute for her to assemble anything like coherent thought about the apparent fact that Draco Fucking Malfoy is currently having an extremely graphic dream about fucking her on his desk in his sad, barely-decorated office. Her. Hermione Jean Granger, mudblood swot spinster extraordinaire.
Grasping for order, Hermione tries to anchor herself temporally. The workday begins in less than four hours. Her chances of sleeping before then seem remote, which means she has approximately five hours before, barring some as-yet-unforeseen intervention, she will have to walk into that bleak little office and sit in front of that cheap, creaky desk and attempt to look Draco Fucking Malfoy in the face and discuss the sorry state of pre-twentieth century wizarding estate records.
If it were anyone else, literally any normal human being instead of six feet of smug, generationally-privileged arrogance stuffed into a suit, Hermione would have the upper hand in this situation. It's not as though she has anything to be ashamed of; it wasn't her dream, and she had looked quite good in it anyhow. More to the point, she isn't the one who's been caught fantasizing about a colleague.
But it isn't any other person, any normal human colleague. It's Malfoy. He can't even be counted on for the basic decency to be embarrassed which means that, in true group-project form, Hermione will end up taking it on for the both of them.