Oh, and remember that some of these were written a while ago and are in need of revising or ditching.
Hermione woke suddenly and completely. She lay perfectly still, her mind uncharacteristically blank, listening to the sounds of Hogwarts at night.
Then images, sensations, unexpected emotions flooded her memory. She had dreamed she was dancing with someone in the moonlight...a someone looking particularly handsome in dark green robes edged with silver...she in the plain blue robes she used when she stayed up late to think of it, she couldn't remember falling asleep. Oh wait, she could. She'd run up the stairs after that mysterious dance, flushed and almost trembling, thrown off her robes and dived into bed before anyone—
But she'd dreamed the dance, hadn't she?
Yet...if she had, it was a dream incredibly real. She could remember how she'd stayed up, studying in the Common Room because she just had to finish that essay, it was due in a week; how she'd needed a book and known just what she'd needed, and it was in the library, and she knew just where it was and just how to get past the locking spells; how she'd heard music floating through the halls, mysterious, beautiful music that called to you; how she'd thrown away caution, just this once, and followed it.
But of course, none of that had really happened.
Hermione Granger would never do anything like that in real life.
Well, all right, perhaps she would.
So perhaps the dream was more realistic than she'd thought.
And perhaps it was more vivid and personal than the ones she usually had, about unfinished essays chasing her through seas of ink or something.
That didn't mean it was real.
Some parts of it, for instance, had been distinctly surreal. Like the door she was sure hadn't been there in daylight, the mysterious ballroom the music had been coming from, the polished silver piano in a corner of the room.
And some parts had been frighteningly familiar...
Draco Malfoy.
In her dream—it was a dream. It couldn't have been anything else—he'd been sitting at the piano, aristocratic hands spanning the keys, and Hermione had known that anyone else there would have seemed sacrilegious...that it couldn't have been anyone else, it just couldn't have been, because that would be wrong, wrong, wrong beyond all belief. And she'd felt inadequate, unworthy, like a stain on silk, like a trespasser in a temple.
But then...
Hermione turned over and buried her face into her pillow for a moment. Up till then, it might have been believable. Of course the Malfoys might be musical—it went with the whole aristocratic image and all—and of course Draco might have found a mysterious room and decided to keep it a secret, because even Malfoys were supposedly human, and who knows? It was plausible, with a slight stretch of the imagination.
But...it was entirely, utterly implausible that Draco glance around to see her, and not sneer at her or hex her into oblivion, but rise after whispering a charm so that the music kept playing and hold out a hand to her.
She could still hear his voice, smooth as moonlight sliding over silver, husky and romantic as a dark spicy-scented rose, dangerous as an unsheathed rapier.
"Dance with me?"
And she'd accepted, because it was a dream, and anything can happen in dreams, even your wildest fantasies.
Not that she'd ever fantasized about Draco Malfoy.
Much.
But she in her plain cotton robe and he in his silk and velvet had begun to waltz.
And she'd been swept up in the sheer perfection of it all, the moonlight, the elegant ballroom, and most of all the boy holding her.
Of course, because it was a dream, Draco had been impossibly gorgeous, a young god.
Of course he didn't look like that in real life.
Much.
Oh, all right, for the past two years he'd been solemnly voted by the female population of Hogwarts to belong in any definition of 'bishounen'. But he wasn't that breathtaking. Because nobody human could be that...that...
Hermione the Walking Encyclopedia didn't even know the name for it.
Anyway, this internal discussion on how attractive Draco looked was utterly pointless because it was only a dream.
She closed her eyes, drawing up the details of the dream and savoring them like sugar on her tongue.
The pure white light, falling softly on his pale hair, caressing his cheekbones and jawline, bringing out hidden lights in the mysterious depths of his eyes.
The almost amused tone of his voice after that last dance, his voice that made her think of sinfully sweet dark chocolate. "It's almost midnight, Cinderella."
The pressure of his hand on her waist, gentle, firm, sending trails of fire up and down her spine.
The sweet, slightly minty taste of his mouth—
Oh Merlin.
He'd kissed her.
Hermione forgot to breathe as the memory came rushing back.
Then she reminded herself it was only a dream and felt a rather unexpected rush of disappointment. Ah, well.
It never hurts to dream.
Not much, anyway.
Not usually, anyway.
She turned on her side, towards the open window, and stared at the sliver of sun that had just appeared on the horizon. She reminded herself that she didn't want Draco Malfoy to kiss her at all. Because she was Hermione Granger, and she was sensible and smart and hadn't been asked out once since Viktor in fourth year. All right, that stung just a little. But not much, because Sensible Hermione doesn't have time for any sort of relationship. Doesn't even see any guys as romantic interests, she's so buried in books.
Hermione reached up to her cheek, and found a bitter tear. She wondered why it was there, and stopped wondering because she didn't want to know the answer.
Anyway, there was no way in any reality that Draco Malfoy would kiss her. She was, as he had often said, just a filthy little Mudblood.
And there was no way in any alternate universe that Draco Malfoy would bow gracefully and hand her a single rose in full bloom. She could remember that rose—that dream-rose—to the last petal. It was the deepest of crimson, its petals stained so red they seemed to make all about them pale. And it had a single leaf still attached to its stem...
What had she done with the rose?
In her dream, of course.
Hermione racked her memory. Ah, there it was. She'd taken it with her, up to her dorms, but cast it aside with her robes. For a wild, unreasoning moment, Hermione almost jumped up to see if the rose was there. Then she regained control of herself and settled on her back, lacing her fingers neatly over her stomach and trying very, very hard not to think about roses and white-blond boys.
She broke.
Scrambling out of bed as quietly as she could, she grabbed her crumpled robe up from the floor and shook it violently for several minutes...
...with absolutely no result whatsoever.
She sank against the foot of her bed and wept for a dream.
It takes a while to translate these to HTML and so I'll probably post about once or twice a day until I get all 7 or so that I've already started. Be warned--there's only one complete ficlet after this.