Not Exactly Perfect

Draco is arrogant and calm and wonderfully imperious. That is why Pansy loves him, and isn't it obvious? He stalks into the room- only his movements are far more lovely and fluid that the word 'stalks' implies- and addresses Harry Potter as if he owned this little group of Gryffindors and Ravenclaws- and, my God, is that a Hufflepuff? What in the world are the requirements to join this group?

So after a few eruptions from Harry "Vesuvius" Potter, the little ragtag army, as Pansy so disdainfully says to Daphne, has gained fourteen members. Pansy doesn't think about her parents and her brother and the second-year password, because this is not what pureblood nobles do. But it is what Draco Malfoy is doing, which makes her feel altogether better about the situation.

Everybody is watching suspiciously for the slightest sign of a hidden Dungbomb, except Hermione, who is peeking at Potter and Weasley, biting her lip a little. And it isn't completely certain to Pansy whether she's trying to choose a hero for the unwanted Slytherins (as if they need her charitable donations of love and demure sweetness), or if she's trying to choose a hero for herself.

Pansy would like to feel contempt for this little Mudblood. But she turns to Potter and the Weasel for that, instead, because it's hard to scorn someone with such a haughty way of tossing her hair. And because of the way Hermione speaks, like it's so clear and defined and obvious.

---

"Death's brother, Sleep."- Virgil (Aeneid)

Hermione thinks that she might rather like to live in idleness. She is careful and conscientious and she likes to know things, but this sometimes seems that it is not her. It is what people have decided, and anyway the things that she would really like to know are not about goblin rebellions.

Wouldn't dream of it, she said once, but it was a lie. Her dreams are when she's more alive and real and vibrant with colours from both ends of the spectrum.

She would rather like to lie near to a lover, warmth merging and enveloping them. Probably in a terribly sinful way, but she doesn't mind. She would like to stay that way forever, if possible, and hides herself behind her hair whenever Parvati and Lavender are giggling about their latest admirers. And then she lies in bed and wonders and finally sleeps, alone.

But sleep is sweet oblivion, and her dreams are more to her than life, sometimes. Because when she glances through her curtain of hair she isn't quite sure what she's looking for.

---

Pansy thinks that she might be paying too many wayward glances to Hermione altogether. Draco explains very clearly and precisely (along with graphs and colour-coded charts) why they shouldn't be called Mudbloods any more. Pansy threatens a third-year into taking notes on what exactly he said, as she watches his hands and his eyes and his lips, and draws a stick figure with a witch's hat on her paper.

She doesn't notice what she is drawing, and later claims that it is a self-portrait, regardless of the smiling face. Pansy never draws smiling faces on the self-portraits drawn in her idle moments.

Now, several months later, she self-consciously adds a tiny heart next to the picture before screwing it up completely and throwing it away.

She doesn't want to think about Hermione. She doesn't want to mentally trace her entire body with her lips. She doesn't want to think about the Hermione that she sees now, nor the unexpected goddess of the Yule Ball, nor the silent sculpture of the summer of second year.

In her most tempted moments, though, she lets her mind drift back to first year. To the almost-nervousness-that-kind-of-looked-a-little-like-confidence that she saw before the Sorting, reciting spells and grabbing at magical hats, as she surveyed Draco Malfoy, glancing continually over Daphne's head. She was far too eager, and everybody smirked except the Hufflepuffs and the Ravenclaws and the Gryffindors, and Draco didn't seem to think that they counted for anything. So they didn't, obviously.

To the ten year old of the first Potions lesson, determinedly Making A Good Impression, as Draco sneered at her, just two seats away (and Pansy might have hated Crabbe for a little while, for refusing to move, except that she didn't).

---

"The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw."- Havelock Ellis, 1914

Some girls want diamonds to be best friend, lover, father and honoured mother and brother to them. They want to drown in precious gems, to be showered with expensive jewelled trinkets. And these are beautiful but so, so lifeless, reflecting the light with their sparkle but giving no light amid the darkness.

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they said. Hermione wrote it down conscientiously amidst her History of Magic notes, learned it as if by rote along with her French verbs and multiplication tables. And in this, she is the beholder.

And she does not dream of emeralds to lie near to her, entangled in her hair and body, hot and close, far too sweaty and messy. She does not want rubies to brush pouting full lips across the nape of her neck, suffocating her in desire, even if they are the colour of passion. She does not blow out candles in hopes of diamonds to hold her close, whispering sweet nothings into her ear.

In all, she thinks that precious gems are not tainted enough to be beautiful.

---

Pansy has stopped watching Hermione. She has returned her attention to Draco, who really must be feeling quite neglected right now. She notices his casual glances at Potter, and secretly labels both of them as fools. She does not tell Draco this, however.

Pansy wonders where the times have gone, when she loved him and loved him, and would continue loving him no matter what he did. She is quite certain that she still loves him as much as she ever did, but her eyes constantly demand to stray to Hermione.

She lets them do this, after she finds Draco and Potter lying next to each other on Draco's bed, touching and whispering to each other. That is not quite what Pansy wants, and she is quite certain that it will not work out. But she watches, and she waits. She thinks that Hermione's choice has been made for her, at first. This is until she realises that Hermione has stopped looking at Weasley or Potter, and is now looking at nothing at all.

The anger and resentment has faded from Draco's and Potter's lives (at least for now, in the fleeting flush of sweetness that covers up the resentment), but Pansy waits for it to reappear elsewhere in the school.

---

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself."- Oscar Wilde, 1891

Hermione is hungry for knowledge. She collects far too much, and devours it all. She reads a lot, not just in books, but in what people say. They'd find it strange, if she told them what font they were written in. But that's how she records people, understands them.

It's funny how she never knows what font she's written in, when she sees herself as more monochrome than anyone else. But she doesn't watch herself; doesn't have enough mirrors- and anyway, she doesn't like her reflection.

She would never venture near the forbidden fruit. She hides once again behind the veil of hair that protects her, whenever she thinks of Harry and his happiness and wellbeing. She thinks only of the loss of unity between the snake and lion, in other parts of the school. She will not allow herself to hold dear thoughts of that which is forbidden to her, and seeks out ancient texts, for fresh knowledge that will fill her mind instead.

She doesn't realise- doesn't let herself realise- that her insatiable need for something so undefined and impossible cannot be fulfilled by knowledge.

---

The word 'Mudblood' is being used again. Pansy sees it scrawled upon the walls of the toilets in the dungeon. Malcolm Baddock nearly took out Creevey's eye. Everyone should have known. Pansy looks on in a strange sort of confused helplessness. She thinks that she should help, but she is not Draco Malfoy or Harry Potter. And they are a little helpless now, too.

Summer passes, and there is a 'mutual agreement'. The general consensus is that Potter told Draco that it was over. Pansy knows that Draco was the one who ended it, but three quarters of the school (and more, now, because it was supposed to help House unity and it didn't and then it stopped and it still wasn't helping it) would not believe her.

Some of the DA Slytherins had fought for Voldemort, after all, had been killed by the people they'd practiced defence with. Anybody who dares to wear a black band for them is shunned. Pansy wears one anyway, all through the summer and autumn.

Hermione has a new society to fight for, or perhaps it is an old one- SPEW. Pansy watches as she explains the wrongdoings of society to a Ravenclaw third year. It feels like Hermione's declaring 'I am Gryffindor, and the eagle and the badger could represent me also, and what does that leave you with?

Pansy knows that that Ravenclaw lost a parent during the summer.

Hermione appears in the Prefects Bathroom, once, when Pansy is leaving. Hermione brushes past her, but Pansy catches hold of her arm, perhaps a little bit too forcefully but she wants to attack her. She wants to shake her by the shoulders and scream and scream because she's supporting House Elf rights, and ignoring the Slytherins, and it's not fair and they're the real underdog and why can't she just see that?

Pansy would also rather like to kiss her. So she does, and she doesn't notice that Hermione's eyes open a little wider, and that she's staring and nothing more. And Pansy doesn't even notice when Hermione's eyes close, and she kisses back determinedly, in a way that has nothing to do with perfection.