Perfection

Hermione Jane Granger was a perfectionist, and everyone knew it. She never stepped a toe out of her dormitory unless her uniform was crisp, clean, and regulation. Even when she was revising in the Gryffindor common room late into the evening, even when her housemates adopted a more casual look, Hermione kept her robes neat and her blouse buttoned all the way to her neck. Her knee socks never drooped down about her ankles like the other girls, and she would sooner kiss a Hippogriff than shorten her skirt by rolling it up at the waist. Her shoes were shined and tied into a perfect loopy bow, her blouse was tucked in, and her tie was always knotted firmly about her collar. People expected it of her.

Even Hermione's small concessions to messiness were organised. The ink smudges on her fingers were scrubbed methodically every night. The piles of books spread out on the wooden library tables had a rhyme and reason about them that only Hermione understood. Her hair...well, that was just hopeless, but it wasn't for lack of trying to reign in its wildness.

On the weekends, or the holidays, Hermione conceded to what she considered to be a more casual look. Neat jeans with no holes or worn spots, shirts that didn't reveal too much, or anything at all, and jumpers that weren't too tight. She always sat with her ankles neatly crossed and her back ramrod straight. She never slouched, slurped, or spoke with her mouth full. She was, to quote one of her favourite childhood films, practically perfect in every way.

As a child, Hermione had demanded perfection of herself. Her stuffed animals were lined up like soldiers against the chair rail in her neat, prim room, and her mother rarely had to ask her to tidy her toys. Hermione was the type of child whose toys stayed organised even when she was playing with them. Being asked to finger paint in nursery school sent Hermione into hysterics, and, when confronted with a pile of presents from Father Christmas, her first instinct was to sort them according to size and style of wrapping paper.

It wasn't that Hermione couldn't have fun. She recognized a good time when she saw one, and she made allowances for her very non-perfectionist best mates. If Harry was scattered, or Ron was messy, she tried very hard not to scold and fuss. After all, they couldn't help their natures any more than she could help hers. She realized that she didn't always succeed in her attempts to love her best friends as they were. Sometimes it was more than she could stand, and before she knew it she was charming a homework planner or creating a colour-coded revision schedule. But, for the most part, Hermione tried her level best not to remake her friends in her own image, and to accept them just as they accepted her, warts and all.

Sometimes it was difficult to give into the unpredictability of Harry and Ron and the rest of the Weasleys. When the three of them had fallen into the Devil's Snare on their way to the Sorcerer's Stone, Hermione's momentary lapse of reason was as much due to her surprise at finding herself in a messy thatch of plant life as it was to anything else. When Harry and Ron described their trip down to the Chamber of Secrets, Hermione was actually thankful that she had been petrified and unable to join them. After the night they had visited the Shrieking Shack was finally over and done with, Hermione had taken a half-hour long shower, trying to rid herself of the stink and the filth and the dust. When Hermione heard they would be camping at the Quidditch World Cup, something inside her cringed. No one would ever know how relieved she had been to walk into the enchanted tent with all the amenities of home. When Harry had gleaned tips from the Half-Blood Prince, Hermione was most offended that he was disturbing the order the things. Students were supposed to learn through the properly prescribed channels, not from some dodgy being who had passed through the school years and years ago. She conveniently set aside the fact that, as a founding member of Dumbledore's Army, she had violated her own rule. Sometimes part of being a perfectionist was knowing when to set aside the rules.

Hermione suffered her best friends' messy habits and unpredictable natures because she loved them with all her heart. She understood that not everyone in the world had her own perfectionist nature, and, deep down, she acknowledged that this was actually a good thing. One lesson she had learned at Hogwarts was that the world was all about balance. Sometimes one had to keep the rules, following them as carefully as a recipe, and other times one had to challenge them. Sometimes life was as neat and organised as the books lined up in alphabetical order on her bookshelf, and other times it was messy and filled with unknowns. Hermione was slowly coming to the realisation that life was not all Light or all Dark, but a balance of them both.

Still, when all was said and done, Hermione was a perfectionist. She knew there were exceptions to the rules, but, when all was said and done, rules were what she liked best. She liked predictability, and order, and boundaries. She preferred cold hard facts to theories, and proven evidence to speculation. She could bend, if needed, and adjust in the face of unpredictability and unknown factors, but at the end of the day, when she neatly folded her uniform and placed it on the seat of the hard-backed chair next to her bed, when she lined up her shoes precisely, when she folded back the covers and climbed into her neatly-made bed, Hermione Jane Granger recognised that she was a perfectionist, and she liked it that way.

Which was why it came as quite a shock to the rational part of her brain that she was pressed up against a tree on the outskirts of the Burrow's property line with Ron Weasley's hand creeping up the back of her shirt, and her own hands doing what they could to muss his hair. What had begun as a walk to discuss their relationship had ended in a very thorough snogging session. Despite Ginny's best attempts to make it seem otherwise, the kiss Viktor had given her had been nothing more than a quick peck on her lips, cold and perfunctory. It had been neat, and predictable, and, Hermione had thought at the time, perfect. There had not been rough bark digging into her back. There had not been the worry that the twins would come barging in any minute and tease them mercilessly. There had not been the feeling that it was not quite proper to be kissing beneath a tree, pressing up against a boy she had loved for years, when a wedding reception was going on a few hundred feet away.

Still, Hermione was happy. It hadn't happened on her own timetable, and there were enough variables that Hermione was worried about where it was all going. The tree was harsh against her bare skin, but Ron's hand was moving in small circles, tentatively, soothing her. Her hair was messy, the first casualty during Ron's assault on her lips, but Hermione found herself not minding nearly as much as she would have expected. Kissing Ron was like jumping into an ocean of unknowing, and she was happily drowning in it with no thought as to what came next. It was nothing like she expected, and a million times better than her best dreams. It was messier and wilder than her fantasies, but she found that she didn't care about that, either. If kissing Ron was wetter or less expert than she had imagined, she didn't mind. They had their whole lives to work on their technique. It was Ron, and, for Hermione Jane Granger, it was perfection.