Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all associated...thingies...are the propery of J.K. Rowling, Warner Brothers, and all that other nonsense. They are, therefore, quite clearly not mine.
A/N: Alright, well here's another abstract take on the WIKTT "Seven Sins" challenge; credit goes to them for inspiring me, I suppose. Like "Gluttony", this was written rather spur-of-the-moment and without much planning, so don't mind its being utterly random. And yes, the horrible pun of a title is deliberate; that's actually what struck me first, and seeing as you can't just post up blank, titled pages here on Fanfiction and expect people to read (stare at?) them, I decided to write a story to go with it. Beware excessive use of the semicolon and the emdash, by the way. ;)
The Pride of Lions
There is an arrogance to her, Severus has decided. It is difficult to place – because she is not arrogant in the usual manner that the word implies, but in a way that is all her own.
It is nothing like a Malfoy's particular brand of conceit, father or son: there is no vainglory to her nature, no curling of the lip and no swaggering walk. There is no condemnation and there is no disdainful looking-down-the-nose; because really, she does not think of herself in that sense. She does not believe herself to be better than everyone else.
She is not like that friend of hers, either, that Ronald Weasley. He is boastful, and he is cocky, and he is loud and full of noise – and she, on the other hand, is gentle, quiet, speaking up only when she feels the need to defend that which she firmly believes is the Good and the Right. Weasley, in his temper and his posturing and his spitting flames, is haphazard, erroneous, a danger to himself and the ego he so strives to inflate; but she is the cool to his heat, the long-smoldering coals to his flash-and-fizzle-out, the patience to the billowing, brooding vexation that his very presence entails.
She is not even like Harry Potter, for all that he is, at times, as subdued as she. He, with his modest but indisputable air of being necessary, of being important, of being vital to the cause; while she gambles her worth like a fistful of sickles, thrown away amongst late nights and ink stains and pages of books. Harry Potter, so very self-assured of his value, of how he is needed; while she brushes away even the most sparing of praise, claiming that it's all just a matter of what she's bothered to learn, claiming that she's no different than anyone else, really.
And even then, through her soft-spoken humility and her honorable smile and her steadfast dedication to the Good and the Right – even then, there is an arrogance to her. It is something – a very small something, a something that Severus is having great difficulty pinning down – inside of her, a candle-flame: something that makes that word arrogance into a whole new string of syllables and letters, filling him not with thoughts of Draco Malfoy and Ronald Weasley and Harry Potter, nor with age-old memories of James Potter and Remus Lupin and Sirius Black – but with something bigger, something warmer, something more whole. It makes the haughty word into something promising, something positive – something deserving of the Good and the Right.
Severus has contemplated this antinomy for quite some time now. And he has concluded that, for lack of anything else to explain it, she must simply be the epitome of true and genuine pride.
Because she is proud – proud in the way of confidence and appreciation, proud in the way of dignity and esteem. She is proud in a way that peoples such as Malfoy and Weasley and Potter, and those long-ago entities Potter and Lupin and Black, cannot even begin to comprehend. She is proud in the way of the meek and the decent, always unpretentious, always unassuming – just forgiving, and respecting, and loving, ever loyal to the path of the Good and the Right. She is the true pride of Gryffindor – the paradigm of all those qualities, all those principles which her House so reveres and yet which society so rarely breeds.
And all of this is his. Somehow, Severus has found himself consumed by her bright-eyed grace, swept up amongst the tides of this sweet, delightful arrogance that has found room in its heart to care for him in a way that rivals even how he cares for her. Somehow, Severus has seen in her that which no one else has ever seen – and she, in turn, has found some way to pick apart his flaws and uncover the virtue buried deep within.
A thought occurs to him, and Severus laughs: because he has snared for himself the greatest pride of lions, and Hermione Granger has come to him in the form of a dazzling creature never to be tamed.