Vanity

Vanity

Hermione's not vain on any account. She gets up in the morning and runs a comb through her hair while brushing her teeth, and does this all with her eyes half-closed. Her tie is prim and proper and her skirt is neatly creased, but her complexion is pale from too many hours in the library and she doesn't care. Her hair is hanging in her face most of the day, and all she does is impatiently blow it out. She doesn't wear makeup, and she doesn't wear perfume--no, Hermione is not concerned with her looks at all. She is as she is.

....Well, she's not vain for her own looks, anyway. When you've got the same head in front of you for six years in a row, it's hard not to be looking out at someone else.

Pansy Parkinson, despite Harry and Ron's description of her 'pug face' and 'squashed nose', is actually very pretty in an evil princess sort of way. Her eyebrows are thin and black and arch high and proudly off her eyelids, which are dusted with a dash of expensive fairy glitter that Daddy bought for her. Her complexion is smooth and taut and milky-white and totally acne-free. Her nose is the only thing that spans opinions; her daddy, apparently, thinks it's too big; her mother, perky; Harry and Ron, squashed; but Hermione thinks it looks cute, and she blushes as she thinks this; blushes as she thinks of most of Pansy's features.

And then there's her hair. It's almost alive, Pansy's hair, as it changes every single year--not the color, which is a sleek and refined black, but the style. First year, when Pansy still let her Mummy tell her how to wear her Pureblood locks, she had curly ringlets bouncing around the sides of her face, and she looked like the fancy dolls in shop windows that Hermione used to be afraid of. Second year, when all the girls were experimenting feverishly with their looks, Pansy had a long, thin plait down her back--that is, until she realized that stupid Hufflepuff Hannah Abbott wore it almost the same way. That was come third year, when she seemed to have sheared it all off in favor of a simple bob. Fourth year was a bit longer; fifth year she wore it in a loose ponytail, and it is now sixth year, and Hermione walks into Potions on the first day of term and stops in her steps.

The dungeon is cold but Hermione feels heat coursing through her veins; a heat she's unfamiliar with, and it makes her dizzy and her knees wobble a bit. For there is Pansy, and sixteen seems to suit her, since she is a bit taller and a bit thinner and her cheeks are a bit rosier and her breasts a bit bigger, and overall, she's more healthy-looking than usual. She is actually smiling, which is a sight Hermione never gets to see because she's always sitting behind the witch-bitch. But her teeth are straight and even and Hermione thinks of her parents for a second, but that quickly becomes lost as Pansy shakes her head slightly and her hair ripples like a wave.

This year, it is as it is. It lies flat down her back and around her face, and it's slightly layered, but only by a few centimeters--from where Hermione's standing, it looks all one length. It's shiny and sleek and reminds her of the ink in a fountain pen, and it's long, so, so long--almost pooling off the edges of the chair. It is...voluptuous, and veela-like, and Hermione doesn't want to move from her spot, because there is a beautiful woman--a beautiful Death Eater--sitting in the chair before Hermione's, who herself still looks like she is fourteen: drab and brown and boring and quite flat. She feels very inferior, but there's no time for that when she's feeling something heavy falling in the pit of her stomach, and--

Pansy throws her hair over her right shoulder in one fluid and alluring motion, and Hermione nearly collapses.

Hermione is not vain on any account for her own self--nature will do the job for her, not her own hands. But as Pansy Parkinson sits there, Hermione thinks lustfully that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and oh how she wants to take that long mane of raven silk and strangle herself with it, because that would be the only way she could die happy.