The human mind is an interesting thing. According to scientists, when we sleep, our mind takes bits of unresolved issues and attempts to resolve them. This process is known as dreaming.

Neither Ginny nor Draco knew any scientists. They only knew that when they slept, they had nightmares. Sometimes they remembered the nightmares. Other times they would wake in a cold sweat, with a terrible feeling of dread. For Ginny, these nightmares had been plaguing her for the three weeks following Neville's death. For Draco, the horrific dreams had been with him for three years.

When Ginny woke in Draco's arms, there wasn't a feeling of dread. There was no cold sweat trickling down the back of her neck. It seemed that the nightmares went away when she was with him. In the past few days, she'd woken four times without being afraid. Three of those times she had woken in his arms, and the fourth was when she had been woken by Minnie, in the middle of a dream about being in Draco's arms.

It was peculiar, to say the least, but before she could spend much more time thinking about it, she slipped back into dreamless sleep.


Draco woke to find his arm wrapped around Ginny, his face buried in her mane of hair, his lips resting on her neck, and his mouth extremely dry. He untangled himself from her and reached over her to the glass of water that was resting on her bedside table.

The water felt wonderful on his parched throat, and he made a little sighing noise of relief when he finished drinking.

"Alcohol makes you dehydrated."

He looked beneath him to Ginny, who still had her eyes closed. He had thought she was asleep. Twisting, he moved to get out of the bed and was stopped by her voice.

"Come back to bed," she ordered. "Hold me."

"That would be wrong."

"Why?" She queried. Her eyes were still closed and he found that it made it much easier to be strong when she wasn't looking at him.

"Neville..." He began.

"Ah, Neville," she said as if something were just dawning on her.

"Exactly," he sighed in relief. Finally she was seeing his point.

"No offense, Draco," she raised one eyelid. "But your logic isn't exactly ingenious."

"I'm not going to be his stand-in," he argued. "It isn't healthy for either of us."

She propped herself up on one arm, her brown eyes going a bit darker as she became annoyed. "Listen, I believe I've made it more than clear that I'm not having any trouble distinguishing between the two of you. I haven't called you Neville and I haven't thought of you as Neville. What's so difficult to understand about this concept? Honestly. Harry and Ron kept spouting off about how all Slytherins were bloody morons, but I didn't ever actually think you were that stupid."

He opened his mouth to say something, but before a word could form on his lips, she was continuing.

"I've also spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to you exactly what I want. I wanted my wand, and you said 'no.' I wanted to know the truth about Marigold. Again; 'no.' I wanted to go home and get back to work, 'no.'"

"The doctor said..."

"This isn't about the bloody doctor! It's about me wanting to be held because I'm cold and you're warm and Neville's dead!"

Somehow, more than any of the other words, "dead" reverberated through the tension filled air. After a moment, Draco tried to placate her. "Ginny, I didn't mean to..."

"You can't take it back now, Draco. We can't just crawl back into bed and cuddle and have everything be fine." She was almost hysterical now.

"Gin..."

"Don't you 'Gin' me. Calling me 'Gin' implies some semblance of closeness. Through a series of extraordinarily embarrassing incidents you've made it blatantly clear that you don't want to be my friend or my lover, only my overly-polite, stupid, cold host. Call me 'Miss Weasley' until you'll allow me to leave this awful place. Now get me my wand or..."

Ginny fully intended to say that he should get out. She was angry as all hell and someone should have to pay. She never got to finish her sentence, because he had silenced her with his lips. Before she could fully surrender to his kiss, he pulled back.

"Don't ever believe that I don't want you."

He kissed her again, and she knew that this time there would be no mistake about what either of them wanted. He could no longer pretend she thought of him as a Neville substitute, or that it was lack of sleep or nail polish fumes causing her reaction.

He forgot that he was kissing her to make the point that he was attracted to her physically. The sensations made him weak. The curl of her hand around his neck, and the cool palm of the other as it snaked up his chest. Her skin was cool beneath his hands, making the sensation of touching her and being touched by her all the more powerful. Her skin was incredibly soft beneath his fingertips and he knew if he held her much tighter there would be bruises by tomorrow. On the surface of his mind, it frightened him to know that he could hurt her. However, somewhere deep in his psyche it goaded him on, because he wanted to leave his mark on her. He wanted something that would effectively communicate to the world that she belonged to him.

He was playing with her neck, kissing, sucking, biting, licking, when he heard a noise. It was faint, but grew louder when he pulled back from Ginny. Her arms dropped and she looked up at him in confusion.

"There's something tapping on the window," he said rather amazedly. He pulled back the sash on the curtain to see what was making the noise and found an owl hovering about outside. With an air of annoyance he opened the window. "What is it?"

The owl zoomed in, nearly taking his head off. "It appears you've been owled, Miss Weasley."