disclaimer: i'm flattered. i am not, however, JK Rowling.

Clever. Brainy. Smart-arse. Intelligent. Brilliant. Astute.

All words that had been used, at one point or another, to describe Hermione Granger. Always something about her intellectual facet, she noted bitterly. Always something describing her brainpower but failing to actually describe her. Why couldn't people see her- Hermione Granger the person and not Hermione Granger the walking encyclopedia with bushy hair and too-large front teeth?

She doesn't recall anyone ever calling her friendly, or talkative or… or… nice, even- adjectives that she hears thrown around on a daily basis for her dorm mates and words she'd always thought were among the easiest to say about anyone else. Even as a child, people who passed her in the street, babbling fluently to her parents as she clutched to two of their much larger fingers, would comment that my, wasn't she an intelligent little girl and what did she want to be when she grew up? Nobody ever came to coo over her pram or called her a beautiful little baby, and even her parents never called her pet names like honey or cherubim or sweetie. They were loving parents, for sure, but it had always been 'my clever darling' and 'brilliant little love'- again, terms describing her intelligence but not her. Sometimes she thinks that maybe some wrinkled, grandmother figure called her adorable once, and she just doesn't remember because she was so young, but she's really only fooling herself. They don't call her astute for nothing- Hermione Granger knows her stuff, and she knows that nobody has ever complimented her.

Instead they just compliment her brain a lot of the time, and sometimes she wants to slap Ron Weasley across the face when he remarks how brilliant she is when all she really wants to hear is that she is pretty. She wants to say that fine if they think she is so bloody intelligent and that wow doesn't she just have a marvelous memory, they can have all her brains and intellect for all she cares, sit with them at lunch and we'll see just how interesting her brain is by itself, hmmm?

Growing up, as a little snot-nosed kid whose only aim in life was to please the teacher who gave her stickers and lollipops and called her a 'clever chookie', her intelligence had been her gift, her one love. She adored the fact that she was cleverer than the other kids- that she could answer every question that the teacher asked and that she could count to one hundred and back in less than a minute.

"…97, 98, 99, 100!"

But she's grown up now, and she is past the age of stickers and glittery pens and the age where being first is the only thing that matters, and she wants to give her brain back- some days all she wants to say is excuse me sir; is there a returns policy on this thing? Because it's getting in the way of my leading a normal life and it appears to be faulty. It's only good for doing calculations and writing essays but it appears there's something wrong with the emotional receptive features- it's completely pants at anything that isn't textbook.

"You look beautiful."

Her breath catches in her throat and she dares not turn around, afraid that everything is going to dissolve around her and she'll wake up to find that none of it was real.

"Excuse me?"

She can feel him behind her but she still won't look- she's running her white-gloved fingers along the marble banister before her, staring out into the dark abyss of the night, and instead breathes the words out more to herself than to him.

He clears his throat and then laughs nervously, "Y-you look beautiful."

Beautiful.

Hermione Granger is seventeen years old, standing on one of the only two remaining Hogwarts balconies in a ridiculously large pink ball gown, hiding from the important figures of society inside the hall as they celebrate- finally- the end of the war, and she has just received her first compliment on something other than how bright or brilliant or magnificently clever she is.

And it's about bloody time.

She finally turns around to look Ron Weasley in the eye, and her heart is beating a tattoo against her rib cage when she smiles and says, "Thankyou."